The Gopher System
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The gopher system may best be thought of as a world-wide document distribution system that presents the user with a common menu interface. The strength of the gopher system is that it is highly distributed, running on many different machines throughout the world. No one machine bears the responsibility of carrying any more information than its own. The entire system is cleverly tied together; each machine queries other machines in order to carry out your requests.
Even your own machine becomes part of the distributed gopher network by what is called a gopher client.
In order to understand the usage of the word client one first must understand 'client-server" application design. The basic idea may be thought of in terms of division of labor. Each machine should concentrate on what it does best. For instance your Macintosh or Windows PC is best at providing you a user-friendly interface. In fact, there are point and click GUI (graphical user interface) based gopher clients for these types of computers. A server is essentially a powerful computer with large quantities of storage on which to keep all kinds of files.
