There is not a separate communications network that is dedicated to the Web, instead the Web provides a different mechanism for accessing sites that are on the Net. If you're already familiar with Internet services such as Gopher and FTP, you already know about those parts of the Web. Web versus Gopher Let's take a moment and compare the Web to Gopherspace. Mark Thacker has written many articles about Gopher in previous issues of Benchmarks and other publications. With Gopher, you run a client on your computer that connects to a Gopher server on another computer, and the information stored on the server is displayed to you through the client software.
Gopher is essentially a text-retrieval system.
Sure, it can be used to download files of all types to a local disk, but it can only interactively display text items. These items are presented in a menu-like hierachy for selection. Because of the textual nature of Gopher, there are clients for just about every type of computer imaginable, including a dumb terminal. No special graphics capabilities are needed to access the information contained within a Gopher system. Gopher systems can generally connect only to other Gopher servers.