Gopher is a network protocol for publishing, browsing and downloading files and is known as a much simpler alternative to the World Wide Web (i.e. to HTTP and HTML). In fact it competed with the Web in its early days, and even though the Web eventually eclipsed Gopher (at least in the mainstream), the underdog still remains alive and kicking, used by small communities (usually the more dedicated, though).
The set of all public Gopher servers is called «Gopherspace». The Gopher protocol was started in 1991 by Mark P. McCahill, Farhad Anklesaria, Paul Lindner, Daniel Torrey, and Bob Alberti of the University of Minnesota and was defined in 1993 in RFC 1436.
Unlike, say, some Websites, Gopher doesn't use any encryption1, it also does not support Unicode, only ASCII - thanks to this, it is mainly just a text-only protocol where embedding images, videos, audio is not possible. Other things that a Website can use, like CSS, JavaScript, colors, are also not possible via the Gopher protocol.
Though some servers allow access via the Tor browser.↩︎
This page was last edited on 2026-09-25 02:04:49.
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