Joy of Access: Gopher

Gopher is like the web that your grandfather used. It’s a lot simpler, and there’s none of this mucking about with making things look nice. Some gopher servers even run on IBM compatibles, replete with eight-character filenames. Try to find something useful in that murky swamp.

Conceptually, gopher is very similar to the web. However, it doesn’t combine links with pages. All you get are links, presented as a menu. Web browsers nowadays also talk gopher, so you don’t necessarily have to know this. You can recognize a gopher by the fact that things no longer look like a web page. (But then, you might also be on an FTP site, and even I don’t want to go there.)