Gopher

A popular distributed document retrieval system which started at the university of Minnesota. Many hosts on the Internet now run Gopher servers which provide a menu of documents. A document may be a plain text file, sound, image, submenu, or other Gopher object. It may be stored on another host or may provide the ability to search through certain files for a given string.

Gopher has largely been superseded by the World Wide Web, a similar document retrieval system which includes access to Gopher documents.