Are you stranded with just your basic Unix toolkit? No internet browser? No gopher client? Use netcat!
echo "/directory/file" | nc domain.name port
For example:
To view tilde.institute root goohermap:
echo / | nc tilde.institute 70
or to get a .txt file from: occ.deadnet.se in /users/how.txt
echo /users/how.txt | nc occ.deadnet.se 70
Hmmmm does echo do the CRLF? I thought I normally
printf "~tomasino/phlog\r\n" | nc tilde.institute 70
which I guess should actually beprintf "%s/%s\r\n" "~tomasino" "phlog" | nc tilde.institute 70
my name is screwtape right
Even better: netcat has a -C flag that will take care of CRLF.