what are the uses of GOPHER?

Question

Gopher is an internet protocol designed to provide an easy means to search and retrieve many documints,also known as articles available on the internet.Clicking an entry in a table of contents or a related article link will display the relevant article, even if it is on a server halfway across the world. Contents are presented by the server hierarchically.

Answer 1

I found Gopher was very use for certain specific research on FTP servers.

Answer 2

Gopher is a distributed document search and retrieval network protocol designed for the Internet. Its goal is to function as an improved form of Anonymous FTP, with features similar to that of the World Wide Web.

The Gopher protocol offers some features not natively supported by the Web and imposes a much stronger hierarchy on information stored on it. Its text menu interface is well-suited to computing environments that rely heavily on remote computer terminals, common in universities at the time of its creation. Some consider it to be the superior protocol for storing and searching large repositories of information.
Every connection made to our gopher server was counted,
whether a user initially connected to the gopher, or selected a
menu item, or navigated down menus. During 1993 there were
872,580 connections made to the server. These connections
were made by 12,335 different computers, which averages out
to one connection every 37 seconds. Throughout the year, the
number of connections per month has steadily increased from a
low of roughly 20,000 in January to 120,000 in December. The
server reached an all-time high in January 1994, when more
than 150,000 connections were made.

Answer 3

It's a DECIDEDLY old-skool alternative to the web and yahoo/google/etc search engines, bizarrely being a bit more true to the "electronic library" promise of the internet. Kind of a shame that little of it survives... not 100% sure on how it works, but it seems sort of like a linked set of BBSes over TCP/IP - you put in the server address then choose options from a numbered/lettered list with layers organised in the familiar tree/directory structure.

To give a better taste of just how old it is, I've been using the internet (in all it's many forms, not just web) intermittently since about 1994, and fairly contstantly since 96, and I don't think I have ever logged on to a Gopher system or seen it outside of a "new users guide to the information superhighway" (circa 1995). The most recent information I heard was that most of the servers were being retired and only a couple were left running. I wouldn't be surprised if the library catalogue system at Bangor University (Wales) is one of them; it was never explicitly Gopher, but it was run on a letter/directory based system with a fairly powerful search feature, accessed through crusty green screen terminals...

Answer 4

It has not much use since we have something called http...