Before the World Wide Web, Gopher was the most popular networking protocol that allowed document retrieval. Gopher is basically just a simple version of HTTP which lacks the facilities offered by HTTP such as MIME. Some people though believe HTTP wasn't the death of Gopher, but the designers of Gopher wanting to charge companies money to use the Gopher server software. Using the University of Minnesota's Gopher, which was the first Gopher, you can connect to Gophers worldwide. You can search Gophers using a program called Veronica.