meaning of gopher

1. One of several North American burrowing rodents of the genera Geomys and Thomomys, of the family Geomyidae; -- called also pocket gopher and pouched rat. See Pocket gopher, and Tucan.
2. One of several western American species of the genus Spermophilus, of the family Sciuridae; as, the gray gopher (Spermophilus Franklini) and the striped gopher (S. tridecemlineatus); -- called also striped prairie squirrel, leopard marmot, and leopard spermophile. See Spermophile.
3. A large land tortoise (Testudo Carilina) of the Southern United States, which makes extensive burrows.
4. A large burrowing snake (Spilotes Couperi) of the Southern United States.
5. A species of wood used in the construction of Noahs ark.
6. gopher 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 documents 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. Tim Berners-Lee, in his book "Weaving The Web" pp. 72-73, related his opinion that it was not so much the protocol limitations of gopher that made people abandon it in favor of HTTP/HTML, but instead the legal missteps on the part of the university where it was developed: "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. 7.">"
7. burrowing edible land tortoise of southeastern North America

Related Words

gopher | gopher client | gopher hole | gopher object type | gopher snake | gopher state | gopher tortoise | gopher turtle | gopherus | gopherus agassizii | gopherus polypemus | gopherwood |

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