Gopher, developed in 1991 at the University of Minnesota, is a text-only, hierarchical document search and retrieval protocol that was supplanted by the more flexible WWW in the mid-1990s. Some servers running this old protocol are still alive, however. The WELL, an online discussion board and community that started back in 1985, is still running a Gopher server. If you’ve got a recent version of Firefox, you can check it out in its original Gopher-y state at gopher://gopher.well.com/ or with any web browser at http://gopher.well.com:70/.
I remember using Gopher (and being quite impressed by it) in the early 1990’s via a UW supplied dialup internet account.
This was before the growth of local ISP’s (Internet Service Providers). The UW told non faculty/students/staff to move on once the internet started to take off (1994?).