Gopher was a browsing and searching system available on certain Internet servers that allowed for the organizing and displaying of information in textual form. Popular in the early and middle 1990s, especially at universities, Gopher was the precursor to the more advanced graphics-based World Wide Web, which employs the HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP). Gopher used a simpler protocol that allowed a user to view text files and resources resident on any accessible Gopher server. The Gopher server would present its contents to the user as a hierarchically structured list of files. In spite of its success, Gopher was eventually displaced by HTTP.

In 1991 Mark McCahill led a team of programmers at the University of Minnesota (which had a team called "the Golden Gophers") to develop Gopher as part of the Campus Wide Information System. It was based on a client-server type program (one that treats the individual workstation...