The best known is Gopher, which was developed right here at the University of Minnesota and is every bit as easy to use as the Web. A main piece of the answer is that while Gopher is very good at transfering information, it is . . . So, to take advantage of advances in multimedia technology, the Web was developed to provide and transfer information with an interface that was graphically-based. That's really just a complicated way of saying it looks pretty darn cool. So the Web is very graphic-oriented, and therefore attractive to use.
Links are nothing more than connections to other locations on the Web anywhere in the world.
It's also a pretty easy task to set up a Web site of your own, and this also helps explain why the Web has become so incredibly popular. As mentioned above, the browser you are using now is called Netscape, which is one of the most popular of the browsers available for the Macintosh and Windows environment. There are close to 100 different browser packages that have been developed, and most of these are very similar in how they operate. These text-based browsers have been developed to be used on computers that either cannot display graphics at all or do not have the capabilities to do so efficiently. Users of such computers therefore still have access to much of the informational content of any particular Web page.