<networking, protocol> A popular distributed document retrieval system which started as a Campus Wide Information System at the University of Minnesota. Many hosts on the Internet now run Gopher servers which provide a menu of documents. A document may be a plain text file, sound, image, submenu or other Gopher object type. It may be stored on another host or may provide the ability to search through certain files for a given string.
Gopher is defined in RFC 1436.
To access Gopher you need a Gopher client. Next you need to know the name of a gopher server. A good place to start is gopher.micro.umn.edu MORE.
The latest releases of gopher software (including client software) are available via anonymous FTP from boombox.micro.umn.edu in the /pub/gopher directory FTP.
Gopher has been largely superceded by the World-Wide Web (WWW), a similar document retrieval system which includes access to Gopher documents as one of its access schemes.
(07 May 1995)