In this paper, I explore the rise and fall of Gopher as the dominant protocol for file search and retrieval over the Internet. After its creation in 1991 at the University of Minnesota, use of Gopher exploded. The popular press lauded it as an important step beyond File Transfer Protocol (FTP), in terms of both usability and ease of implementation. The growth of Gopher was soon overshadowed, however, by the World Wide Web. A major milestone is this direction was the release of the Mosaic graphical browser by the University of Illinois National Center for Supercomputing Applications [NCSA] in 1993.