A Brief History of Gopher

This mentions a couple of reasons for Gopher being suddenly eclipsed by the www: the web’s graphical hypertext, and Gopher’s non-free licensing. There are a couple more things.

1993 was when everyone was excited about multimedia and hypertext – tho typically from CD-ROMs, like Encarta and Myst. Windows 3.1 was displacing DOS. In this context Gopher’s text menus seemed stuck in the past despite using the futuristic Internet.

And at a technical level Gopher was designed to be usable by extremely limited client hardware, and its protocol didn’t have room to grow in a way that could make use of 32 bit computers with graphical user interfaces. By contrast the www was clearly geared up for the future: HTTP and HTML were far more sophisticated than Gopher.

I remembered using "Archie" to search gopher and FTP, but I did not remember "Veronica" and "Jughead". I also found it interesting that gopher was the early substrate for publishing the software that ran the early web.