What Is Gopher

Computer History Notes - Herong's Tutorial Notes

∟1991 - Gopher Protocol Created by a University of Minnesota Team

∟What Is Gopher

This section provides a quick introduction of the Gopher protocol that allows distributed documents to be linked and presented as a hierarchy of items and directories.

What Is Gopher? - Gopher is an Internet protocol that allows distributed documents to be linked and presented with a hierarchy of items and directories much like a file system. Gopher protocol and related software was released in 1991 by Mark McCahill, Farhad Anklesaria, Paul Lindner, Dan Torrey, and Bob Alberti of the University of Minnesota.

In a Gopher system, there are many distributed Gopher servers. Each Gopher server serves mainly two types of information:

A directory of items representing documents and other directories on the local server or remote servers.
A document on the server's local file system.

Gopher clients programs are designed to:

Display the directory received from the server as a menu to allow the user to select any items, if a directory is received.
Display the document on the screen, if a document is received.
Request the item from a Gopher server, if the user selects an item from a gopher menu.