<article lang="&language;" id="gopher">
<title
>gopher</title>
<articleinfo>
<authorgroup>
<author
>&Lauri.Watts; &Lauri.Watts.mail;</author>
<othercredit role="translator"
><firstname
>Malcolm</firstname
><surname
>Hunter</surname
><affiliation
><address
><email
>malcolm.hunter@gmx.co.uk</email
></address
></affiliation
><contrib
>Conversion to British English</contrib
></othercredit
> 
</authorgroup>
</articleinfo>

<para
><command
>gopher</command
> began as a distributed campus information service at the University of Minnesota. Gopher allows the user to access information on Gopher servers running on Internet hosts.</para>

<para
>Gopher is an Internet information browsing service that uses a menu-driven interface. Users select information from menus, which may return another menu or display a text file. An item may reside on a Gopher server you originally queried, or it may be on another Gopher server (or another host). Gopher can <quote
>tunnel</quote
> from one Gopher to another without the user knowing that the server and/or host machine have changed. Gopher keeps the exact location of computers hidden from the user, providing the <quote
>illusion</quote
> of a single, large set of interconnected menus. </para>

<para
>Gopher permits the user to record an item's location in a <quote
>bookmark</quote
> thereby allowing users to follow a <quote
>bookmark</quote
> directly to a particular item without searching the menu system. Gopher menus are not standardised, inasmuch as each Gopher server is individually determined. </para>

<para
>Source: <ulink url="http://tlc.nlm.nih.gov/resources/tutorials/internetdistlrn/gophrdef.htm"
> http://tlc.nlm.nih.gov/resources/tutorials/internetdistlrn/gophrdef.htm</ulink
> </para>
</article>