At the University of Minnesota, a computer programmer Mark MaCahill released the biggest library card index in the world in 1991. This index, the first point-and-click way of navigating the files of the Internet,is free for nonprofit institutions.Gopher is a client/server system that can be used on a number of machines.
The client end of Gopher is a menu-driven program that enables you to select from a menu. These choices are of three types. The first leads you to a submenu. The second accesses local resources for data. The final type leads to a request being sent out on the network to retrieve files or yet another list of information from another Gopher server. Each gopher server has links to other gopher servers and so.
With Gopher, you can tunnel through and "boldly go where no man has gophered before". This is done by intergrating other tools such as telnet and ftp so that once you have found what it is that you want you can go straight to it without having to find the right utility, enter the address of the target of the search, and so on.
Shortly after gopher came into being the language for html allowing for the use of other media within a graphical user interface (GUI) began replacing this once popular means of navigating the internet. Don't be surprised by the lack of information now available via gohper because the world wide web and its many web sites presents the same information now in a better format.
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