Anonymous ftp is rather inflexible, you normally have to transfer the file to your local computer before viewing it and the mechanism for navigating the remote computer is fairly primitive. There are no indexes and so on.
Gopher (Developed at the University of Minessota) is a different way of making information available over the Internet. A Gopher server provides files of information organised under a hierarchical menu system. You can browse these files using a gopher client program. One example is the program xgopher. Gopher menus may include items that are not located on a single gopher server. Thus, selecting a menu item may connect you to a different gopher server, from there you might connect to yet another server and so on as you browse around the Internet.
Oxford University provides a lot of information accessible by Gopher. Simple items such as the University Telephone Directory, the text of the Gazette and so on, can all be browsed on-line through gopher. Many molecular biology sites also provide gopher access to the nucleic acid and protein sequence databases. Brookhaven Laboratory provides a gopher access point for the PDB structural database. Currently, this is the quickest way to find out if a protein has been deposited in the database.