Searching For Data With Gopher
Telnet is a terrific tool, but it requires a fair amount of knowledge about the Internet. In particular, you’d need to know a lot of computer names to be able to exploit fully the many services available. This is doubly true for FTP, and even with the Archie service, it’s still quite difficult to find information on the Internet.
The computer services group at the University of Minnesota found the same problem when they began to make online documentation available to their students. As a result, they invented Gopher, a menu-based front-end to documents, information, and services available on the Internet.
Gopher is a one-stop shopping source for Internet information. A menu-driven document-delivery service, you can use Gopher to browse the Internet’s resources, read text files, and access information of all kinds. With Gopher, you “burrow” through a series of nested menus to find the information you need on any computer system connected to the network and running Gopher software.
As does FTP, a variety of Gopher programs offer access to the data through Mac, PC, or dialup systems. All the software is free, and we will show the dialup service again, so you can see how to step through menus and then show the same information on TurboGopher (the Mac Gopher client) and Winsock Gopher, a shareware Windows client.
The most powerful aspect of the Gopher service is that any system can include a variety of links to other Gopher servers. The result is a network-wide information source called Gopherspace.
Gophers also provide gateways to other Internet information systems such as World Wide Web, WAIS, Archie, and Whois and to network services such as telnet and FTP. When you access a Gopher site, the files you see listed on the menu in front of you could be housed anywhere on the network-on your local server or on a computer system thousands of miles away. By simply choosing an item from the menu on your screen, you can access that information within minutes.