You are now entering the PC Anatomy portal

Gopher was an internet protocol developed in 1991 that provided a simple, menu-driven method for navigating and retrieving text documents. It was an early and popular alternative to the World Wide Web, but was eventually surpassed by HTTP and HTML.

How Gopher worked: The Gopher protocol operated on a client-server model and presented information in a hierarchical, text-based menu structure, much like a file system.

Menu-based browsing: Users accessed content by navigating a series of menus. Selecting a menu item might lead to another submenu, a document, or a search engine.

Plain text: Gopher was lightweight and efficient because it was designed primarily for text documents, making it ideal for the low-bandwidth networks of the early internet.

"Gopherspace": The universe of all interconnected Gopher servers was often referred to as "Gopherspace".

Search tools: To help users find information within Gopherspace, search tools were developed, including "Veronica" (for indexing Gopher menu titles) and "Archie" (for FTP file indexes).