Gopher

GOPHER... It's a small burrowing animal isn't it? Well... Yes and No. GOPHER is also the name of a system that pre-dates the World Wide Web for organising and displaying files on Internet servers. A Gopher server presented 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.