On Amiga I'm amazed of AmiGemini+AmiSSL, a Gemini client for an OS from 1993 (a 68030 it's requiered and a 68040 encouraged, but hey...) whlle Windows XP still lacks a native client (and compiling LibreSSL on it with w32Devkit it's a breeze). And don't even start me talking about Windows 95/98...
Gemini has gemini://gemi.dev/cgi-bin/waffle.cgi which does wonders on reading main news sites (and newspapers) without completely destroying the layout on an Amiga/simple Nix web browser, even for something like Dillo on Nix, which I tuned to avoid remote CSS files and set to send the PSP User Agent (Sony's console browser was respected from most CMS') , but even with that using News Waffle from Gemi it's far better. It cut downs the bandwith even more and the layout it's pretty much simplified and far better rendered.
gopher it's fast even under a 8086. It's just a step over Netcat and echo. If you can push bytes over the network and later print them, you are done.
But, as I said, from gopher I love gopher://magical.fish (portal to everything, Gopherddit, HNGopher, News, text games...) and most sites from the Bitreich Gopher Lawn. But Gemini has jewels, too.
