The article discusses reviving gopher, but doesn't mention how to access it (sure, I could invest a bit of time and effort googling how to do that, but that seems beside point for an article evangelising its revival).
Yes, I was a little disappointed by that too. It even has a "gopher://..." link at the end and when I click on it I can't even open it. Just tell me how I can open the one example you provide man!
There was a time when gopher: scheme URLs would just work, because GOPHER support was built in to popular WWW browsers. Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer both had it, for example.
It's not that gopher: is some novelty that no-one has ever adopted. It's that a WWW browser nowadays lacks quite a lot of things that used to be commonly built-in to WWW browsers. gopher: scheme support has gone completely, as has news: support. ftp: support has been reimplemented several times, and is significantly poorer now than it used to be.
At the risk of shameless self-promotion, there are Firefox add-ons and at least several mobile clients. Disclaimer: I wrote a number of the ones on this page.
It's cross-platform: I use the statically linked Linux binary. Loads very quickly, like Dillo. Author commented on HN once on something unrelated and I stumbled across it on his site. Doesn't do images (yet) and I just discovered that it doesn't let me highlight text (bummer) but overall... nice client to have.
Hopefully the author (runtimeterror) continues to work on 'Little Gopher'.
As mentioned, Lynx still supports the protocol. It's an easy protocol to implement [1] such that you could possibly write on in shell using little more than `nc`, `less` and possibly some `awk` (or similar) to format the index pages (it's mostly text anyway).
