This tutorial will teach you how to create a Gopher Server using InetD with PHP. This will teach you how to create a simple socket server using InetD and it will teach you something about the gopher protoco

Gopher, developed in 1991 at the University of Minnesota, is a text-only, hierarchical document search and retrieval protocol that was supplanted by the more flexible WWW in the mid-1990s. Some servers running this old protocol are still alive, however. The WELL, an online discussion board and community that started back in 1985, is still running a Gopher server. If you've got a recent version of Firefox, you can check it out in its original Gopher-y state at gopher://gopher.well.com/ or with any web browser at http://gopher.well.com:70/.

Thanks to Jason Kottke’s recent blog post about Gopher, people are discovering or rediscovering Gopher. Gopher is a text-based system for navigating documents on the Internet that was extremely popular in the early 90s and helped create and influence a lot of the content and culture that’s now shared via the World Wide Web. Today, we follow links to sites with http:// at the beginning of them, but in 1992, it was much more common to follow a gopher:// link, which still works in browsers like Firefox today