I don’t know much about gopher, the TCP/IP protocol, except that it dates way back to the early 90s and to the University of Minnesota in America.
I couldn’t tell you if it was a good thing or a bad thing, a better way to do business or a throwback to a simpler time.
I did find the gopher client though, which is pretty cool.
Basic text-based movement, fairly quick on the uptake and with a fun thing to do here or there. Reminds me of telnet, for some reason.
That screenshot is from Debian, by the way. The Arch version, I am sad to report, crashed and burned when I tried to build it.
I hope that’s not a sign that the past has already left us. 😦
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This is the original University of Minnesota client (all be it much patched over the years) and to be frank by modern standards not a terrible good gopher client. The only time most gopher enthusiast wheel it out is when playing with one of the handful of sites out there that support the Gopher+ standard. In a console environment you are probably far better off using Lynx or Elinks (with Elinks support for Gopher needs to be enabled at compile time), if one prefers a GUI environment then take a look at the Overbite project.
If anyone wants to explore Gopher further then gopher://floodgap.com/ is probably a good starting point and gopher://gopherpedia.com/ is a good example of what can be done with gopher. To talk about Gopher please join #gopherproject on the Freenode IRC network.