Yes, I said the Gopher Internet. No, I don't mean little rodent things.
You see, way back before these new-fangled graphical web browsers like Firefox and Internet Explorer were invented, there were two Webs. There was the world wide web, and then there was the Gopher web.
The World Wide Web has, obviously, gotten pretty popular. You're using it right now. It's estimated that there are more than 12 billion publicly accessible websites on the WWW today.
Gopher, meanwhile, has stagnated. According to the biggest Gopher search engine, there were less than 100 Gopher sites left in the world as of 2007. And Mozilla has announced that future versions of Firefox (starting with Firefox 4) will not even be able to display Gopher sites.
Gopher is dying, and will soon be gone entirely. There are a huge number of things that have contributed to its failure as an opposing standard to the WWW, from poor marketing to licensing fees to the fact that it's named after a type of rodent. It's like Blu-Ray versus HD-DVD, only less people care.
You probably haven't even heard of Gopher before. And who can blame you? It's a fading star, now only used by nostalgic geeks. But believe it or not, there's some cool stuff on the Gopher internet. Why limit yourself?
Most URL's you've seen probably start with http://. For example, this URL to this website is http://www.tekeeze.com. Gopher URLs, on the other hand, always start with gopher://. The URL to the Gopher search engine mentioned above is actually gopher://gopher.floodgap.com.
Gopher websites are not known for their flashy designs, colorful fonts, or for lots of images. They usually consist of text and links. If you don't like reading unless it's a picture book, you might not like Gopher.
I'll admit, it wasn't easy finding the links listed below. With so few Gopher sites out there these days, I was hard pressed to find even seven that would appeal to a general audience like the people who visit this site.
Having said that, I think you might find you like some of the ones I did manage to find. Take a look…