Gopher is an interactive Internet browser. It is something of a successor to FTP and predecessor to the Web. Gopher had a brief moment of popularity in the early 1990s, but was eclipsed within a few years by the web. Gopher’s chief innovation was presenting menus that could refer to content across many different servers. This was a contrast to systems of the time, such as FTP or telnet, that had no programmatic way to point to content elsewhere, and made it cumbersome to switch to alternati...
