gopher

networking, protocol A distributed document retrieval

system which started as a Campus Wide Information System at

the University of Minnesota, and which was popular in the

early 1990s.

Gopher is defined in RFC 1436. The protocol is like a

primitive form of HTTP (which came later). Gopher lacks the

MIME features of HTTP, but expressed the equivalent of a

document's MIME type with a one-character code for the

"Gopher object type". At time of writing (2001), all Web

browers should be able to access gopher servers, although few

gopher servers exist anymore.

Tim Berners-Lee, in his book "Weaving The Web" (pp.72-73),

related his opinion that it was not so much the protocol

limitations of gopher that made people abandon it in favor of

HTTP/HTML, but instead the legal missteps on the part of the

university where it was developed:

"It was just about this time, spring 1993, that the University

of Minnesota decided that it would ask for a license fee from

certain classes of users who wanted to use gopher. Since the

gopher software being picked up so widely, the university was

going to charge an annual fee. The browser, and the act of

browsing, would be free, and the server software would remain

free to nonprofit and educational institutions. But any other

users, notably companies, would have to pay to use gopher

server software.

"This was an act of treason in the academic community and the

Internet community. Even if the university never charged

anyone a dime, the fact that the school had announced it was

reserving the right to charge people for the use of the gopher

protocols meant it had crossed the line. To use the

technology was too risky. Industry dropped gopher like a hot

potato."

(2001-03-31)