The Gopher protocol.

• Gopher is a protocol for distributed search and transfer of application—level documents, which was widely distributed on the Internet until 1993. The protocol is intended to provide access to documents on the Internet, but has fewer features than HTTP, and was subsequently almost completely superseded by it. 

• The gopher protocol has a more rigid structure of information placement, very similar to the directory structure in the file system, which consists of nested directories and files. The hierarchical structure of links allowed users of text terminals, mainly in universities, to find the necessary information very quickly. 

• The protocol is based on client-server technology, the 70th TCP port is assigned to it. After the client establishes a TCP connection with the server, it sends a string that contains a request for the desired document or an empty string to get the first page of the site. The server responds and closes the connection.