Gopher Tutorial

Gopher is a distributed document delivery service that supports access to various types of data residing on multiple hosts in a seamless fashion. This is accomplished by presenting the user a hierarchy of menus and documents.

Starting Gopher.

The gopher client runs on your local machine and talks to gopher servers all over the network. Gopher can be invoked from the Internet Nebraska Menu, Alternatively, from the Unix shell prompt, type 
	gopher machine.name
where `machine.name' is the name of a machine with a gopher server. For example, 
        gopher umn.edu
connects to the server at the University of Minnesota where gopher began.

Using Gopher.

The gopher client program is menu-driven and easy to use. There is a list of keystroke commands at the bottom of the screen. Help is available by pressing the `?' key. Type `q' to exit gopher. Looking at the menu, select the the number of the item you want via the keyboard or by moving the menu selector using the arrow keys. Then hit return. Depending on the type of item you select, you will either see another menu or the contents of a file. You can move back up the menu hierarchy by typing `u'. If you use gopher much, you may want to learn more about gopher options by reading the man pages.

More About Gopher.

Once you connect to a gopher server, you seamlessly connect to other gopher servers all around the world without worrying about the names or locations of those servers. One of your problems may be that there is too much information out there on the network. If you want to better use your time in gopher-space, you might want to check out the `alt.gopher' and `comp.infosystems.gopher' newsgroups. You might also check out `archie', `veronica', `jughead' and `wais' to help you locate information.

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Last updated 4/04/96