GOPHER... It's a small burrowing animal isn't it? Well... Yes and No.
GOPHER is a distributed document delivery service that pre-dates the World Wide Web for organising and displaying files on Internet servers. A Gopher server stores files containing text, binary data, directory information (called the phone book), images and sound, presenting its contents as a hierarchically structured list of files
With the ascendance of the Web, many gopher databases were converted to Web sites which could be more easily accessed via Web search engines.
Gopher was developed at the University of Minnesota and named after the school's mascot. Two systems, Veronica and Jughead, provided a keyword search of the information accessable by the Gopher system.
Gopher client software is used to search for and retrieve files from Gopher servers anywhere on the Internet.
Welcome to the gopher server at quux.org! This is one of the world's few remaining maintained, modern gopher servers. On it, you will find a collection of information, files, software, archives, and mirrors pertaining to a wide variety of topics of interest to computer enthusiasts.