Gopher was more widely used that WWW until 1994, and it was a basic install on most Internet nodes in the first few years of 90's. The point of Gopher was it was one of the first widely deployed protocols that allowed you to find things, like a Mosiac Browser to download. It died quickly but was an important stepping stone.

In 1990 IRC had average of 12 users :) (but other chat programs were used before IRC) . True FTP, other chats, MUDs, email, etc. were widely used/available.

I was reading a lot in the newsgroups starting in 1992 and saw a steady increase in http URLs being included in posts, and IIRC there was never a time when the frequency of gopher URLs exceeded that of http ones.

Note that the web is older than Gopherspace with the first gopher site appearing in mid-1991.

While looking up that last fact, I see that there was heavy interest in gopher by colleges and universities. Maybe our experiences differ because you were in college then?