ALL meanings of gopher
go·pher
G g - noun Technical meaning of gopher (networking, protocol) A distributed document retrieval system which started as a Campus Wide Information System at the University of Minnesota, and which was popular in the early 1990s. Gopher is defined in RFC 1436. The protocol is like a primitive form of HTTP (which came later). Gopher lacks the MIME features of HTTP, but expressed the equivalent of a document's MIME type with a one-character code for the "Gopher object type". At time of writing (2001), all Web browers should be able to access gopher servers, although few gopher servers exist anymore. "It was just about this time, spring 1993, that the University of Minnesota decided that it would ask for a license fee from certain classes of users who wanted to use gopher. Since the gopher software being picked up so widely, the university was going to charge an annual fee. The browser, and the act of browsing, would be free, and the server software would remain free to nonprofit and educational institutions. But any other users, notably companies, would have to pay to use gopher server software. "This was an act of treason in the academic community and the Internet community. Even if the university never charged anyone a dime, the fact that the school had announced it was reserving the right to charge people for the use of the gopher protocols meant it had crossed the line. To use the technology was too risky. Industry dropped gopher like a hot potato." 1
- noun gopher North American rodent 1
- noun gopher computing: retrieval system 1
- noun gopher A burrowing rodent with fur-lined pouches on the outside of the cheeks, found in North and Central America. 1
- noun gopher an employee whose chief duty is running errands. 1
- verb without object gopher Mining. to mine unsystematically. to enlarge a hole, as in loose soil, with successively larger blasts. 1
- noun gopher A small burrowing rodent, especially in the family Geomyidae. 0
- noun gopher The gopher tortoise. 0
- noun gopher Alternative spelling of gofer. 0
- countable noun gopher A gopher is a small animal which looks a bit like a rat and lives in holes in the ground. Gophers are found in Canada and the USA. 0
- proper noun gopher In computing, Gopher is a program that collects information for you from many databases across the Internet. 0
- noun gopher any burrowing rodent of the family Geomyidae, of North and Central America, having a thickset body, short legs, and cheek pouches 0
- noun gopher any burrowing tortoise of the genus Gopherus, of SE North America 0
- noun gopher any of a family (Geomyidae) of burrowing rodents about the size of a large rat, with wide cheek pouches; pocket gopher 0
- noun gopher any of a number of striped ground squirrels (genus Citellus) found on the prairies of North America 0
- noun gopher a burrowing land tortoise (Gopherus polyphemus) found in SE U.S. 0
- noun gopher a person born or living in Minnesota, called the Gopher State 0
- abbreviation GOPHER gofer 0