Gopher

What Does Gopher Mean?

Gopher is an application-layer protocol that provides the ability to extract and view Web documents stored on remote Web servers. Gopher was conceived in 1991 as one of the Internet’s first data/file access protocols to run on top of a TCP/IP network. It was developed at University of Minnesota and is named after the school’s mascot.

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Techopedia Explains Gopher

Gopher was designed to access a Web server or database via the Internet. It requires that files be stored in a menu-style hierarchy on a Gopher server that is accessible through a Gopher-enabled client browser and/or directly. It initially supported only text-based file/document access but later came to support some image formats such as GIF and JPEG.

Gopher was succeeded by the HTTP protocol and now has very few implementations. Gopher-based databases, servers or websites can be accessed through two search engines: Veronica and Jughead.

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Margaret Rouse

Margaret Rouse is an award-winning technical writer and teacher known for her ability to explain complex technical subjects to a non-technical, business audience. Over the past twenty years her explanations have appeared on TechTarget websites and she's been cited as an authority in articles by the New York Times, Time Magazine, USA Today, ZDNet, PC Magazine and Discovery Magazine.Margaret's idea of a fun day is helping IT and business professionals learn to speak each other’s highly specialized languages. If you have a suggestion for a new definition or how to improve a technical explanation, please email Margaret or contact her…