Yes, I do. I loved Gopher. When I was a senior in high school in 1992, a buddy and me discovered Gopher. We were a really unlikely pair of nerds: I was into skateboarding and my buddy was a starting lineman on the HS football team. For the post-internet generation here, you have to understand just how unusual and uncool it was to be into computers in the early 90s. Even the nerds at my school weren't into BBSes or the early Internet but we were, in a closeted sort of way. So, every day at lunchtime, we would go home to our respective houses and get on a BBS and chat with each other just because the technology was so cool.

One day, we were on a local Waffle BBS (I think it ran on BSD-OS or something like that) and we read about a dialup at the local university that could be used to get a gopher client. You would dial into their terminal server and this gave you unauthenticated telnet access anywhere. From there, we would telnet to liberty.wlu.edu, some kind of *nix server (probably Sun) that had a no-auth-required login that would get you a Gopher client. From there, we would browse the Gopher-web, which was pretty amazing for 1992. We'd visit gopher servers in Sweden, Japan, Germany, everywhere. We believed that when we went from the WLU gopher (in Virginia) to a Gopher server in Sweden, that a modem was dialing between those two locations and so on. We were really worried that we'd get in huge trouble for racking up tens of thousands of dollars in long distance.

Yeah, I loved gopher. :)

Gopher is still a thing in certain parts of the enthusiast scene.

Notably, https://gopher.floodgap.com/ has been running since 1999 and is still going. It's accessible through a HTTP(S) gateway nowadays too since all common browsers have dropped native Gopher support.

The server also hosts the directory of known currently active Gopher servers:

https://gopher.floodgap.com/gopher/gw?gopher.floodgap.com/1/...

...and of course there is the Hacker News mirror for those net users who don't have HTTP/WorldWideWeb access:

https://gopher.floodgap.com/gopher/gw?gopher://hngopher.com:...

I have a fanless thin client acting as server as home that runs a little Gopher server just for fun. It's very easy to set up and play with and there are several daemons for it that run on modern operating systems and are available in most package repositories.

I remember seeing Mosaic and thinking “meh, not much more than gopher”. I sure didn’t have the vision of where all that would lead!

Yes, gopher was pretty amazing and if it had won, given its well organized nature, there would have been much less need for a google to add some order to the tangled mesh of the web than the tree of the gopher-verse.

Oh yeah. I ran gopher. But once I Installed Mosaic I never looked back. I knew the http web would be big but I vastly underestimated how big. Hindsight and all that...