Gopherspace

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. The interconnected collection of information servers and documents that was navigated through the Gopher protocol in the early days of the internet
2. The early online realm of menu-driven gopher sites, linked together to share text files and directories across computer networks
3. A former part of the internet made up of gopher-accessible resources, browsed through hierarchical text menus before the rise of the World Wide Web

Etymology: Gopher was the name of a menu-driven system for browsing information on the early internet, developed at the University of Minnesota, whose sports teams are called the Golden Gophers. That nickname gave the software its name, and the word "gopherspace" was coined by analogy with "cyberspace" to describe the territory that Gopher servers covered. The "space" half is the familiar noun for a region or domain, so the whole term reads as "the realm of Gopher." Gopher's appeal was its simplicity. Users navigated nested lists of documents, files and links using plain text rather than the hyperlinked pages that the World Wide Web later made standard. Gopherspace was therefore a hierarchical, text-first network, and the term has stayed mostly in technical and historical writing, where it marks that earlier phase of online life before the web displaced it.