History of Gopher

History
The Gopher protocol and original Gopher viewer application were first developed at the University of Minnesota in the early 1990’s as part of the drive to make use of the Internet to enable the simple sharing of documents with people who could be located in institutions on opposite sides of the country or even the world, and to have those documents organised so that similar / related pages would be easily accessible. The value of the Gopher system was enhanced by the development of two systems known as Veronica and Jughead which allowed a user to search across resources stored in Gopher file hierarchies on a global basis. As for the naming of the system, the University of Minnesota sports teams were called the ‘Golden Gophers’ and the sports mascot was thus a large gopher, it has been said that the protocol was named in honour of the mascot, and also as in an assistant who's sent to ‘go for’ things.