Telnet is a user command and an underlying TCP/IP protocol for accessing remote computers. Through Telnet, an administrator or another user can access someone else’s computer remotely. On the Web, HTTP and FTP protocols allow you to request specific files from remote computers, but not to actually be logged on as a user of that computer. With Telnet, you log on as a regular user with whatever privileges you may have been granted to the specific application and data on that computer.
The result of this request would be an invitation to log on with a userid and a prompt for a password. If accepted, you would be logged on like any user who used this computer every day.
Telnet is most likely to be used by program developers and anyone who has a need to use specific applications or data located at a particular host computer.
Gopher
Gopher is an application-layer protocol that provides the ability to extract and view Web documents stored on remote Web servers. Gopher was conceived in 1991 as one of the Internet’s first data/file access protocols to run on top of a TCP/IP network. It was developed at University of Minnesota and is named after the school’s mascot.
Gopher was designed to access a Web server or database via the Internet. It requires that files be stored in a menu-style hierarchy on a Gopher server that is accessible through a Gopher-enabled client browser and/or directly. It initially supported only text-based file/document access but later came to support some image formats such as GIF and JPEG.
Gopher was succeeded by the HTTP protocol and now has very few implementations. Gopher-based databases, servers or websites can be accessed through two search engines: Veronica and Jughead.
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