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