It predated the World Wide Web as a client for browsing. It was developed at the University of Minnesota and named for the School's mascot.

The client was not graphical. I felt like it was like swinging from vine to vine with each vine being a gopher site. Once one was on a site one could drill down a directory structure of published data. One would access an initial site by typing in it's IP address or domain name. One could then follow the gopher links until exhaustion or all the links on that site were visited.

There was a period of time before the WWW was graphical and I found gopher far superior for browsing. One had to download files and then view them locally using local tools.

One could even follow a gopher link to the WWW. The splash page had the slogan "Welcome to the World Wide Web there is no top or bottom". This could not be said of Gopher sites where each site had to be connected to directly and all the links on the site could be visited.

Once IP addressees became available to the public WWW browser became graphical. This made the Gopher less useful since it was stuck as terminal browser. The IP address made the machine one was browsing from addressable to every host on the internet. This made inline graphics more practical because they could be rendered in line while browsing.