What Is the Gopher Protocol? Internet History Explained

Automatically transcribed from the original recording. Small transcription errors may remain.

Let's talk about the Gopher Protocol. Now, before the World Wide Web took off in the mid-90s, the Gopher Protocol and Ecosystem was a method designed for searching and retrieving documents via a menu-driven user interface. And it was developed in the late 80s to organize documents for easy access by students and faculty at the University of Minnesota. And the core principle that guided the development of the system was simplicity. Information was basically accessible by Gopher and is stored as files on Gopher servers. and Gopher servers present information as a top-level directory that contains resources such as files and or subdirectories containing additional resources. It ultimately fell into disfavor, yielding to the Hypertext Transfer Protocol, or as we know it today, HTTP. However, Gopher is still around, and you can download Gopher extensions for Firefox and Chrome, or download a Gopher web browser like Acid or Gofi. So in our next video, we will be talking about a different protocol called Gemini.