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An Anonymous Coward writes:

For many people, the world wide web is synonymous with the Internet. While the HTTP protocol dominates the modern Internet, many protocols obsolete, obscure and well known make up the Internet.

One of the more stubborn protocols is Gopher. Introduced in 1991 (the same year as HTTP), Gopher, like the web, is document-centric.

By about 1990, information on the Internet was expanding rapidly enough that it needed more organization and a better search capability. In 1991 researchers at the University of Minnesota developed the Gopher protocol in an attempt to provide some of that organization. Gopher provides a hierarchical text-based menu system to organize the contents of a data repository (which eventually came to be called "gopherholes").

https://prgmr.com/blog/gopher/2018/08/23/gopher.html

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