Gopher: early 1990's

The Gopher Procotol was a pre-http hypertext transfer protocol popular in the early 1990's. It was used a lot by colleges and researchers to shared information. Gopher forces a hierarchical site design similar to directories and files. The HTML markup language used for the world wide web allows for addressing other pages from any other pages. Although gopher once was more popular than ftp, there are not many gopher sites left. Voice of America continues to provides a gopher newsfeed, which is a precursor to rss feeds. Mozilla still supports the gopher protocol. The floodgap.com site has a gopher to web gateway so that you can still browse any gopher sites by Internet Explorer.