Year: 1991
Port: 70
Created by: Mark McCahill, Farhad Anklesaria, Paul Lindner, Daniel Torrey, Bob Alberti — University of Minnesota
A hierarchical menu system for navigating directories and text documents. Faster and simpler than FTP. Navigated via gophermap files — each entry is a type prefix, display text, path, and server address, tab-separated.
Built in secret to route around a design-by-committee campus information system. Released without official approval — and then the rest of the Internet found it. Briefly competed with the World Wide Web as a genuine equal in 1991–1993.
Lost when the University of Minnesota announced licensing fees for commercial use. Tim Berners-Lee had declared HTTP and HTML free forever. Within two years, the race was over because of one institutional decision about money.
The name is a triple pun: the University of Minnesota's mascot (Golden Gopher); the act of burrowing; and “go-fer” — someone who fetches things on request.
Veronica-2 Gopher search index statistics:
| Date | Servers | Unique Selectors |
|---|---|---|
| January 2026 | 411 | 5,856,111 |
| August 2025 | 432 | 5,254,158 |
| June 2025 | 296 | 5,113,382 |
| February 2024 | 323 | 5,113,957 |
| November 2020 | 358 | 5,973,552 |
| January 2020 | 395 | ~4,500,000 |
| 2007 | 86 | 740,000 |
Maintained entirely by people who choose it, with no corporate backing.
| Prefix | Type |
|---|---|
i | Info line (display text, not a link) |
0 | Plain text file |
1 | Directory / submenu |
h | HTML / URL link |
9 | Binary file |
Fields are tab-separated: type+display\tpath\tserver\tport
Important: Gophermap files require real tab characters. Vim's .vimrc detects gophermap filenames and sets noexpandtab automatically. See Vim.
A phlog (Gopher + blog) is a blog maintained in Gopherspace, updated via a gophermap. TTBP on tilde.town publishes entries to both HTML and Gopher simultaneously.
The public_gopher/feels directory is synced to the gopherhole.
Files live in ~/gopherholes/, synced to tilde.town via rsync:
./bin/gopher-build.sh # copies content to gopherholes/output/ ./bin/sync-to-tilde.sh # syncs to tilde.town
Hosted at: gopher://tilde.town/1/~brennan