If you were to take a look at my computer room you would probably think that  once a day I organize it by throwing in a hand grenade. You would have a difficult time finding anything, but I know where everything is. Computer directories are  often in a similar state. Locating something on a large computer can be frustrating. After all, it was probably organized by someone like me. To help make information more easily accessible, the University of Minnesota developed Gopher.

You have probably heard about the Pony Express.  They provided the fastest most efficient way to get mail to the west coast.  They had a wonderful thriving business  for all of about a year and a half, before they went bankrupt.  The telegraph was responsible for their premature demise. Gophers were also doomed to a premature death by the invention of the World Wide Web.  However, unlike the Pony  Express, Gophers are still hanging around and are work a look.

Gopher offers a menu driven way of searching the net. Instead of seeing cryptic directory and file names that mean little or nothing, the user sees a hierarchical  menu with topics and descriptive file headings. They are great ways to explore net resources. You just go to a menu and make a choice. Gophers are an easy way for  the novice or the expert to gather information. In fact they are responsible for the first big explosion of Internet users. Gophers removed the 'geek' factor from the net. No longer was it necessary to know Unix and spend long hours with your  Captain Video decoder ring. All you had to do was find a subject of interest and follow the menu structure to the information you wanted.

There are tools for searching gopher space. There are gopher Archies that do the  same thing as the ftp Archies, but instead of having to write down a long address and ftp to the site, gopher lists all of the places that have the file you are looking for  and allows you to retrieve it by making the menu selection. Archie's friend, Veronica, allows you to search gopher menu items.

Even without knowing anything about Archie or Veronica, you can have a lot of fun exploring gopher holes. Here's an opportunity to do just that.

The Mother of All Gophers is the gopher at the University of Minnesota. The Library of Congress has a very large, well organized gopher. Gopher Jewels are... Well, you can find out for yourself.

Since Gopher is such a popular tool, there are many sites that provide you with all the information that you will need for successful exploration of the net's Gopher holes. Here are a few that you can visit.

Road Map, Patrick Douglas Crispen's famous Internet tutorial, has two lessons GOPHER (PART ONE) and GOPHER (PART TWO) that will provide you with  good information about NON WEB gopher access, but much of the information is useful to web users.

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