Gopher could link to a telnet session which might open a connection to a university library card catalog. Mosaic was the first generally available graphical World Wide Web browser and it served as the basis for the program we now know as Netscape . All of a sudden, WWW became worth the trouble it was to maintain. Here was a way to mix graphics and text on the same page served over the Internet. Gopher was still limited to a rigid menu structure and every item, text or graphic, appeared as one of the menu elements.
Gopher is now mostly just a memory.
There are gopher servers still in operation, but its days as a useful network technology have been numbered for quite some time. Web browsers can display information from a Gopher server, but it's been quite some time since I have stumbled upon one. Gopher did, however, provide the proving ground for a number of ideas, the basic one being that online information was a useful and worthwhile endeavor. The Also-rans Over the last 20 years, there have been a number of networks that have provided national and worldwide connectivity of one type or another. Before there was an Internet backbone dedicated to the transfer of online information, the simple telephone network was the primary resource to transfer data.