Another older interface to information on the Internet is supplied by Gopher. Gopher is a menu-based method of browsing and retrieving information. Gopher menus can point to other gopher menus, even on other machines. Hence, gopher begins to have the flavor of a "hyperlinked" data retrieval system. To find a specific piece of information in "gopher space," you can use VERONICA. (Side note: Archie searches FTP-space, Veronica searches gopher-space - Archie and Veronica... get it? Computer people are sometimes too cute. Speaking of cuteness, Veronica stands for Very Easy Rodent Oriented Netwide Index to Computerized Archives.)

TurboGopher

On the Mac, you can use TurboGopher to explore gopher-space.

<ftp://ftp.micro.umn.edu/pub/gopher/Macintosh-TurboGopher/>

Netscape

Of course, since most web browsers, including Netscape, have built-in gopher clients, you can cruise gopher sites directly by using a URL of the type:

<http://home.netscape.com/comprod/mirror/client_download.html>

Note that "http://" has been replaced by "gopher://" in the URL. This allows you to look at gopher sites.