Gopher

     Gopher is an Internet application that was hot stuff in its day.  It allowed you to browse many different kinds of resources by looking at menus or listings of information available. Its function was easy to remember because of its name: you used Gopher to "go fer" information that was on other computers all over the world. The menus in the Gopher system allowed you to see what information was there; the Gopher client on your system then brought the information you wanted to your computer screen. The Gopher servers of the world were all interconnected and were compared to a large library full of resources. It was really pretty cool back in its heyday.

     Below is the first screen of the old FLTEACH gopher. This will give you an idea of what a gopher menu looked like. Moving the arrow to the item you want was the way to select and move through the layers of each menu.

We don't use Gopher anymore as all these resources have been ported to WWW formats, but I think it is a really cute icon so I just can't give it up yet.  Besides, some day you may be on "Jeopardy" or "Millionaire" or some such show, and a question about Gopher might arise.  So now you know . . . just in case.