Along with e-mail, remote logon, and file transfer, information indexing and retrieval was one of the original big four concepts behind the idea of internetworking.
Though there were a plethora of different data indexing and retrieval experiments in the early days of the Net, none was ubiquitous until, in 1991, Paul Lindner and Mark P. McCahill at the University of Minnesota created Gopher. Though it suffered from an overly cute (but highly descriptive) name, its technique for organizing files under an intuitive menuing system won it instant acceptance on the Net.
Gopher treats all data as a menu, a document, an index, or a Telnet connection. Through Telnet, one Gopher site can access others, making it a true internetwork application capable of delivering data to a user from a multitude of sites via a single interface.
The direct precursor in both concept and function to the World Wide Web, Gopher lacks hypertext links or graphic elements. Its function on the Net is being taken over by the Web, though there are currently still several thousand Gopher sites on the Net, and it will probably be years before Gopher disappears completely. Because so much information is still contained in Gopher databases, the ability to navigate and view Gopherspace is now built into most Web browsers
Though there were a plethora of different data indexing and retrieval experiments in the early days of the Net, none was ubiquitous until, in 1991, Paul Lindner and Mark P. McCahill at the University of Minnesota created Gopher. Though it suffered from an overly cute (but highly descriptive) name, its technique for organizing files under an intuitive menuing system won it instant acceptance on the Net.
Gopher treats all data as a menu, a document, an index, or a Telnet connection. Through Telnet, one Gopher site can access others, making it a true internetwork application capable of delivering data to a user from a multitude of sites via a single interface.
The direct precursor in both concept and function to the World Wide Web, Gopher lacks hypertext links or graphic elements. Its function on the Net is being taken over by the Web, though there are currently still several thousand Gopher sites on the Net, and it will probably be years before Gopher disappears completely. Because so much information is still contained in Gopher databases, the ability to navigate and view Gopherspace is now built into most Web browsers
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