I remember discovering gopher through the wonderful TurboGopher program. All the fiddling around with FTP was revealed to be pointless and dumb. For a brief period, really until Altavista came along to make Mosaic useful, Gopher was so cool. But at school we all had our public_html directory being published to the world, and you could nag the sysadmin to install cgibins, whereas gopher was an institutional thing and focused on files.

Tangent: NNTP is still better than any web forum, fb or twitter. Too bad solving the spam problem is only via centralised identity platforms.