In the text-based browser I used back then, Gopher appeared nice and neat, with easy to read lists, whereas whatever web browser presented stuff in a sort of jumbled way. Gopher seemed like the better system and I wasn't really impressed with the www stuff I'd load.
Wow, I had never heard of it, but that looks pretty cool. Gopherpedia is a complete interface to Wikipedia which I'll probably make use of.
Anyone else running Lynx? I don't use it for normal browsing (FF+NoScript like many others here) but I do fire it up for some of the purposes listed in the original article - works well with my workflow, no distractions, and of course it's really safe. Incidentally, it still fully supports Gopher.
I used Lynx back in my glorious startup days (12-15 years ago :) it was a great tool to see what the various crawlers (which were Altavista, Lycos, Yahoo and Hotbot at the time) were actually "seeing" on the pages of my site. It helped solving issues with spacing, alt texts...
I was working at a university in the UK and got to see Mosaic in 93(I think, it was a very early beta). I said to the main sysadmin "It's very pretty, but it will never replace gopher". He still reminds me of that fact occasionally. Even then it wasn't as fast or efficient to get data/documents out of and I stand by that judgement.
My experience was that content was a first-class-citizen of the gopher-net, because we didn't have "hyper media".