I started using the Internet at a time when HTTP traffic already exceeded Gopher+FTP traffic, but not by orders of magnitude. I'd start nearly any session with

I started using the Internet at a time when HTTP traffic already exceeded Gopher+FTP traffic, but not by orders of magnitude. I'd start nearly any session with Gopher, and it would end in either some web pages or an FTP server. Gopher was the go-to because it was organised unlike the rat's nest of links you had to deal with on the web. This wasn't really fixed until the advent of big centralised search engines (and even then, the early ones weren't worth damn).