Gopher Gopher Gopher is a menu driven tool that leads you to a wealth of files and information. When you enter a Gopher session, you actually use the resources of a remote Gopher host system tuned to respond to Gopher commands. You can Gopher from host to host seamlessly. Gophering might appear to be just a menu change to you, but a menu choice might send you to a system on another continent to perform a telnet session or across the state for an ftp session. This flexibility exists because the underpinnings of Gopher point to routines that use telnet, ftp, white pages servers, library systems, electronic bulletin board systems, and other communication tools.
Gopher is available as client software on most Internet provider hosts.
You access it by just typing the word gopher at your Unix shell prompt, and you will log into a Gopher server elsewhere. If Gopher is unavailable as client software on your provider's host, you may telnet to a Gopher. You will rarely have to telnet to use Gopher, however. You may also Gopher to a specific Gopher server. There are thousands of Gopher servers around the world, and you can get to most of them, eventually, by selecting menu item after menu item.