Gopher protocol
Gopher is a distributed document search and retrieval network protocol
designed for the Internet. It was released in 1991 by Paul Lindner and Mark
McCahill of the University of Minnesota, whose mascot is the Golden Gophers.
Gopher's original design goal for sharing documents was similar in scope to
the World Wide Web, and as such has been almost completely displaced by it.
The Gopher protocol offered some features not natively supported by the Web,
imposing a much stronger hierarchy on information stored in it, and many
consider it to have had the superior protocol for storing and searching
large repositories of information.
When the web was first introduced in 1991, Gopher was well-established and
quite popular. Then, in February of 1993, the University of Minnesota
announced that they would begin to charge licensing fees for Gopher's use,
which scared off many people and organizations that ran Gopher servers. Some
people believe this is what relegated Gopher to a footnote in the history of
the Internet.
Many people believe that Gopher's downfall was actually caused by its
limited structure, making it inflexible compared to the free-form HTML of
the Web. With Gopher, every document has a defined format and type, and the
typical user must navigate through a single server-defined menu system to
get to a particular document. Many people did not like the artificial
distinction between menu and fixed document in the Gopher system, and found
the Web's open-ended flexibility much more useful for constructing
free-form, interrelated sets of documents and interactive applications.
Gopher's search engine is Veronica. Veronica offers a keyword search of most
gopher-server menu titles in the gopher web. A Veronica search produces a
menu of gopher items, each of which is a direct pointer to a gopher data
source.
Gopher support was removed from Internet Explorer in June, 2002 due to a
security vulnerability. Mozilla retains support for the protocol however in
later builds it is disabled by default. As of 2002, there are still a few
gopher servers present on the net, in organizations such as the Smithsonian
and the US government ; a few are also being maintained by enthusiasts of
the protocol.
As of January 2003, Super Dimensional Fortress has begun giving free
gopherspace.
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