gopher

gopher

1. any burrowing rodent of the family Geomyidae, of North and Central America, having a thickset body, short legs, and cheek pouches

2. another name for ground squirrel

3. any burrowing tortoise of the genus Gopherus, of SE North America

4. gopher snake another name for bull snake

Collins Discovery Encyclopedia, 1st edition © HarperCollins Publishers 2005

gopher

[′gō·fər]

(vertebrate zoology)

The common name for North American rodents composing the family Geomyidae. Also known as pocket gopher.

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Gopher

[′gō·fər]

(computer science)

A menu-based program for browsing the Internet and finding and gaining access to files, programs, definitions, and other Internet resources.

McGraw-Hill Dictionary of Scientific & Technical Terms, 6E, Copyright © 2003 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.

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."

This article is provided by FOLDOC - Free Online Dictionary of Computing (foldoc.org)

Gopher

A protocol for searching file names and resources on the Internet that presents hierarchical menus to the user. As users select options, they are moved to different Gopher servers. Where links have been established, Usenet news and other information can be read directly from Gopher.

Thousand of Servers in its Heyday
Originally introduced in 1991 at the University of Minnesota, there were more than 7,000 Gopher servers on the Internet at one time. Gopher popularity declined as content on the Web increased throughout the 1990s, and by 2007, there were barely 100 servers remaining. Gopher client support was added to Web browsers for a while, but was not always complete and later abandoned in most cases. See Veronica, Archie, Jughead, WAIS and World Wide Web.

When Gopher Reigned

When it was introduced in 1993, the Mosaic Web browser came equipped with a list of Gopher and FTP servers (see Mosaic). (Image courtesy of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) and the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois.)

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