Gopher was born in 1991 as a means of document sharing. It was popular with universities but was more or less obsolete by 1993, mainly because the world wide web was growing in popularity and did not have some of the restrictions that gopher had.

A second level menu on a gopher server showing a list of folders

Unlike the world wide web with its HTML pages and mark up, links, pictures and videos, gopher sites were very plain to look at, and unlike the loose linking structure of the web, users had to navigate through a server-defined menu with a strict hierarchy to find a particular document. They used a text based menu for navigation which was defined by the owner of the server who chose what documents to make available. Documents were, in general, plain text although other file types, such as images, could be made available they were NOT embedded in pages as with the world wide web but instead just offered for download as standalone files, in much the same way as modern FTP sites.

Viewing a document in gopher.

Gopher stopped growing around 1993 for a couple of reasons. Firstly the University of Minnesota stated it would be charging licensing fees for its implementation of the gopher server, and secondly the world wide web with its much richer content was gaining in popularity.

There are still a number of gopher servers available in 2009. In fact the number of servers has grown from around 100 in 2007 to about 125 today. Most modern browsers can also navigate gopher services (except IE because it’s crap), so if you want a peek at the past, go to gopher

We’ve come a long way in 2 decades, haven’t we?