Technical Briefs

ROHAN help Files

gopher

gopher is an Internet service that allows you to use simple, consistent menus to access a wide variety of distributed information and services that lie anywhere on the Internet. Information like the Library of Congress Catalog and services like ftp, archie, wais, and the World Wide Web.

Gopher consists of two pieces of software: Client and Server. You use Gopher Client software to access information on hosts that are also Gopher Servers. Gopher Clients have a seamless view of the information even though the information is distributed over hundreds of Gopher Servers. Gopher Clients navigate through a hierarchy of menus, directories, and documents, or ask an index server to return a list of all documents that contain a specified search keyword(s). Since the Gopher handles full-text searches, every word in every document can be a keyword.

MS-DOS and Macintosh users with the appropriate Gopher Clients and Ethernet access can access the full range of capabilities that gopher offers. Client software for these computers can be obtained from the /pub directory at the ROHAN Anonymous FTP Archive.