Gopher

Gopher is a protocol created around the same time as the World Wide Web, but which initially was more popular due to its plain-text and menu interface being better suited to the low-capability, low-bandwidth systems of the time; however, as computers got more powerful in subsequent years, the Web rapidly exceeded its popularity due to its graphical and multimedia capabilities.

Gopher was created at the University of Minnesota and named after that university's mascot.

The "gopher:" URL scheme was created for the Web as a way to allow Gopher sites to be accessed through Web browsers, though many browsers lack the ability to handle this protocol.

Links

 * Wikipedia article
 * RFC 1436 – The Internet Gopher Protocol (a distributed document search and retrieval protocol)
 * RFC 1580 – Guide to Network Resource Tools
 * RFC 1689 – Networked Information Retrieval: Tools and Groups
 * RFC 1727 – A Vision of an Integrated Internet Information Service
 * RFC 4266 – The gopher URI Scheme
 * Overbite add-on for Firefox
 * Archive.org Gopher mirror