Besides Gopher we had WAIS, Archie, and Veronica. There were also sites with multiple directories of text and binary files via (often anonymous) FTP. BBS systems with text clients or even reachable over Telnet or SSH were once popular and some are still available. We also had talkers (and MUDs, and MOOs, and MUSHes) where one could connect to a text-based environment to play games, chat, build the environment collaboratively with others, or some mix of those.
I remember back before my area had a local phone number for any direct Internet access, there were a few choices. One could get SLIP or PPP by calling long distance. There were per-minute toll-free access numbers. One could use a local echo on a dial-up BBS and wait several hours to a few days for the content. We thankfully had a public library in one of the bigger cities that had a web browser (Lynx) set up as a shell on a VMS system via a getty on a toll-free line. Several of us would rent a shell account somewhere, dial into the library, and use the browser to telnet to our shell accounts. Then we could use a text-based web browser, gopher client, WAIS client, Archie/Veronica client, FTP, or whatever from there. If we wanted to download a file back to our desktops, we'd download it to the shell account then use Kermit or Zmodem through the telnet connection back to our local systems.
I think the shift from WAIS, Archie and Veronica resulted from the idea of a web site, complete with rendering, catching on. People didn't want a universal directory of files. I remember navigating Gopher felt very similar to navigating the old dial-up BBS. Whereas WWW connected the entire web together into a singular entity replete with rendering. I recall that being the primary reason WWW won.
I'm not sure it was so much the web, which with Lynx, Links, w3m, or some others looked a lot like Gopher. I think it was that the early graphical browsers (Mosaic and Netscape for example) embedded the linked graphics into HTML documents over HTTP but didn't do the same for other document formats on other protocols. That is, the presentation is what mattered more than the underlying platform being presented.
I remember back before my area had a local phone number for any direct Internet access, there were a few choices. One could get SLIP or PPP by calling long distance. There were per-minute toll-free access numbers. One could use a local echo on a dial-up BBS and wait several hours to a few days for the content. We thankfully had a public library in one of the bigger cities that had a web browser (Lynx) set up as a shell on a VMS system via a getty on a toll-free line. Several of us would rent a shell account somewhere, dial into the library, and use the browser to telnet to our shell accounts. Then we could use a text-based web browser, gopher client, WAIS client, Archie/Veronica client, FTP, or whatever from there. If we wanted to download a file back to our desktops, we'd download it to the shell account then use Kermit or Zmodem through the telnet connection back to our local systems.