The name "pocket gopher" on its own may be used to refer to any of a number of genera within the family. These are the "true" gophers; however there are several ground squirrels in the distantly related family Sciuridae that are often called gophers as well.

Description

Gophers weigh around 0.5 pounds (230 g), and are about 6–8 inches (150–200 mm) long in body length, with a tail 1–2 inches (25–51 mm) long. A few species reach weights approaching 1 kg (2.2 lb). Within any species, the males are larger than the females and can be nearly double their weight.[3]

Their lifespan is normally one to three years[4] assuming no diseases or predation. The maximum life span for the pocket gopher is approximately five years.[5] Some gophers, such as those in the genus Geomys, have lifespans that have been documented as up to seven years in the wild.[4]

Most gophers have brown fur that often closely matches the color of the soil in which they live. Their most characteristic features are their large cheek pouches, from which the word "pocket" in their name derives. These pouches are fur-lined, can be turned inside out, and extend from the side of the mouth well back onto the shoulders. Gophers have small eyes and a short, hairy tail, which they use to feel around tunnels when they walk backwards.

Pocket gophers have been found to often carry external parasites.[4] Common predators of the gopher include weasels, snakes and hawks.[6]

 Archie is a program that allows you to search the files of all the Internet FTP servers that offer anonymous FTP. Archie is actually an indexing spider that visits each anonymous FTP site, reads all the directory and file names, and then indexes them in one large index. A user can then query Archie, which checks the query against its index. To use Archie, you can Telnet to a server that you know has Archie on it and then enter Archie search commands. However, it's easier to use a forms interface on the Web called ArchiePlex.
Although Archie is often credited as being the Internet's first seach engine, it ultimately became less important with the growth of the World Wide Web. It was perhaps of most use for serious researchers who already know that the topic of their search is likely to be found on FTP servers. Veronica is a program similar to Archie that indexed and searched the files on 

The protocol was invented by a team led by Mark P. McCahill at the University of Minnesota. It offers some features not natively supported by the Web and imposes a much stronger hierarchy on information stored on it. Its text menu interface is well-suited to computing environments that rely heavily on remote text-oriented computer terminals, which were still common at the time of its creation in 1991, and the simplicity of its protocol facilitated a wide variety of client implementations. More recent Gopher revisions and graphical clients added support for multimedia.[citation needed] Gopher was preferred by many network administrators for using less network resources than Web services.[1]

Gopher's hierarchical structure provided a platform for the first large-scale electronic library connections.[2] Gopher has been described by some enthusiasts as "faster and more efficient and so much more organised" than today's Web services.[3] The Gopher protocol is still in use by enthusiasts, and although it has been almost entirely supplanted by the Web, a small population of actively maintained servers remains.

Origins

Gopher system was released in mid-1991 by Mark McCahill, Farhad Anklesaria, Paul Lindner, Daniel Torrey, and Bob Alberti of the University of Minnesota[4] in the United States. Its central goals were, as stated in RFC 1436:

Gopher combines document hierarchies with collections of services, including WAIS, the Archie and Veronica search engines, and gateways to other information systems such as FTP and Usenet.

The general interest in Campus-Wide Information Systems (CWISs)[5] in higher education at the time, and the ease with which a Gopher server could be set up to create an instant CWIS with links to other sites' online directories and resources were the factors contributing to Gopher's rapid adoption. By 1992, the standard method of locating someone's e-mail address was to find their organization's CCSO nameserver entry in Gopher, and query the nameserver.[6]

The name was coined by Anklesaria as a play on several meanings of the word "gopher."[7] The University of Minnesota mascot is the gopher,[8] a gofer is an assistant who "goes for" things, and a gopher burrows through the ground to reach a desired location.

Stagnation

The World Wide Web was in its infancy in 1991, and Gopher services quickly became established. By the late 1990s, Gopher had largely ceased expanding. Several factors contributed to Gopher's stagnation:

Gopher remains in active use by its enthusiasts, and there have been attempts to revive the use of Gopher on modern platforms and mobile devices. One such attempt is The Overbite Project, which hosts various browser extensions and modern clients.

As of 2012, there were approximately 160 gopher servers indexed by Veronica-2,[14] reflecting a slow growth from 2007 when there were fewer than 100,[15] although many are infrequently updated. Within these servers Veronica indexed approximately 2.5 million unique selectors. A handful of new servers are set up every year by hobbyists – over 50 have been set up and added to Floodgap's list since 1999.[16] A snapshot of Gopherspace as it was in 2007 was circulated on BitTorrent and is still available.[17] Due to the simplicity of the Gopher protocol, setting up new servers or adding Gopher support to browsers is often done in a tongue in cheek manner, principally on April Fools' Day.[18][19] In November 2014 Veronica indexed 144 gopher servers,[14] reflecting a small drop from 2012, but within these servers Veronica indexed approx. 3 million unique selectors. In March 2016 Veronica indexed 135 gopher servers,[14] within which it indexed approx. 4 million unique selectors.

 Archie, Gopher, Veronica and Jughead are three standard "finding" tools on the Internet. The Archie database is made up of the file directories from hundreds of systems. When you search this database on the basis of a file's name, Archie can tell you which directory paths on which systems hold a copy of the file you want. 

 To use Archie, you must Telnet to an Archie server. You can do that by keying in a command such as telnet://archie.internic.net to get to the Archie server at that address and log on by keying in archie when prompted to do so. Once you do your Archie search, you must then go get the file using FTP, the Internet File Transfer Protocol. 

 A Gopher is a menu system that simplifies locating and using Internet resources. Each Gopher menu at each Gopher site is unique. Gopher menus usually include the other familiar features of the Internet. You can use a Gopher to Telnet to a location or to FTP a file or to do just about anything else--as long as that option is listed on the Gopher menu. 

 Gopher software makes it possible for the system administrator at any Internet site to prepare a customized menu of files, features and Internet resources. When you use the Gopher, all you have to do is select the item you want from the menu. 

 The Veronica database is a collection of menus from most Gopher sites. When you do a Veronica search, you are searching menu items. In the course of the search, Veronica builds an on-the-spot menu consisting of just those items that match your request. When the search is finished, Veronica will present you with a customized Gopher menu. 

 Veronica will not only present you with a list of Gopher menu items, it will also act like a Gopher. The Veronica database of all Gopher menu items is called Gopherspace. Thus, if you used Veronica to search Gopherspace for the word supreme, you would most likely come up with a Gopher-style menu listing the places to get U.S. Supreme Court decisions. At this point, you could simply choose an item, and Veronica would automatically take you there. 

 Jughead is available at some Gopher sites and uses the menu items on a single Gopher menu as its database. - See more at: http://www.netlingo.com/more/gopher.php#sthash.LKRRfAoR.dpuf

Just like Veronica is an index into Gopher, Archie is an index into anonymous FTP. The Archie database stores filenames from a large number of anonymous FTP archives. The database can be queried with partial filenames or regular expressions and it will return a list of matching filenames together with the addresses where they can be found.

Although the Archie databases (there are about twenty of them around the world) are not updated as frequently as Veronica, they are great for finding the latest versions or nearest copies of software or documents. Of course, Archie suffers from the same problem as Veronica, and that is that the filenames do not convey much information about the contents of a file, but in Archie the context is shown in the form of a directory path.

Archie is an application of the Prospero protocol, but for people without Prospero clients, there is also the possibility to log into a machine running an Archie database and give commands inside a restricted shell.