GOPHER

networking

Stands for: Gopher protocol

A pre-web protocol for browsing menus of documents.

The Gopher protocol (RFC 1436) organized internet documents into hierarchical menus and predated the World Wide Web. It survives as a curiosity and, notably, as an SSRF attack vector.

Gopher predates the web and organized information as a hierarchy of menus rather than a graph of links. It was structured, predictable and easy to browse, and for a short period in the early 1990s it carried more traffic than HTTP.

Its collapse is usually attributed to the University of Minnesota's 1993 announcement of licensing fees for server software, at a point when the web was free and unencumbered, and the timing is hard to separate from the outcome. Whether the licence was decisive or the web's hypertext model would have won regardless is genuinely debated. Either way it is the cleanest available case study in how licensing terms can determine which of two technologies survives.

Also known as: gopher

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