| Archie | |
|---|---|
 Screenshot of Archie | |
| Original author | Alan Emtage |
| Developers | Bunyip Information Systems, Inc. |
| Initial release | 10 September 1990; 35 years ago (1990-09-10)[1] |
| Final release | 3.5 / 1996 |
| Written in | C |
| Operating system | Solaris,AIX |
| Type | Search engine |
| Website | bunyip.com/products/archie/ (original product page, archived) archie |
| Internet history timeline |
Early research and development:
Merging the networks and creating the Internet:
Commercialization, privatization, broader access leads to the modern Internet:
Examples of Internet services:
|
Archie is a tool for indexingFTP archives, allowing users to more easily identify specific files. It is considered the firstInternetsearch engine.[2] The original implementation was written in 1990 byAlan Emtage, then a postgraduate student atMcGill University inMontreal,Canada.[3][4][5][6]Archie was superseded by other, more sophisticated search engines, includingJughead andVeronica, which were search engines for theGopher protocol. These were in turn superseded byWorld Wide Web search engines likeAltaVista and directories likeYahoo! in 1995. Work on Archie ceased in the late 1990s. A legacy Archie server was maintained for historic purposes in Poland atInterdisciplinary Centre for Mathematical and Computational Modelling in theUniversity of Warsaw until 2023.
With assistance from the University of Warsaw, a new Archie server was created and opened for public access at The Serial Port, a web-based computer museum, on 11 May 2024.[7][8]
Archie first appeared in 1986, while Emtage was thesystems manager at theMcGill University School of Computer Science. His predecessor had attempted to persuade theinstitution to connect to theInternet, but due to the expensive cost — roughly $35,000 per year for a sluggish link toBoston — it had been challenging to persuade the appropriate parties that theinvestment was worthwhile.[9]
The name derives from the word "archive" without the 'v'. Emtage has said that contrary to popular belief, there was no association with theArchie Comics.[10] Despite this, other early Internet search technologies such asJughead andVeronica were named after characters from the comics.Anarchie, one of the earliest graphical FTP clients, was named for its ability to perform Archie searches.
The earliest versions of Archie would simply search a list of public anonymousFile Transfer Protocol (FTP) sites using theTelnet protocol and create index files available via FTP. To view the contents of a file, it had first to be downloaded. The indexes are updated on a regular basis (contacting each roughly once a month, so as not to waste too many resources of the remote servers) by requesting a listing. These listings were stored in local files to be searched using theUnixgrep command.
The developers populated the engine's servers with databases of anonymous FTP host directories.[11] This was used to find specific file titles since the list was plugged in to a searchable database of FTP sites.[12] Archie did not recognize natural language requests nor index the content inside the files. Therefore, users had to know the title of the file they wanted. The ability to index the content inside the files was later introduced byGopher.
Emtage and Heelan wrote a script allowing people to log in and search collected information using theTelnet protocol at the host "archie.mcgill.ca" [132.206.2.3].[13] Later, more efficient front- and back-ends were developed, and the system spread from a local tool to a network-wide resource and a popular service available from multiple sites around theInternet. The collected data would be exchanged between the neighbouring Archie servers. The servers could be accessed in multiple ways: using a local client (such asarchie orxarchie);telnetting to a server directly; sending queries byelectronic mail;[14] and later via aWorld Wide Web interface. At the peak of its popularity, the Archie search engine accounted for 50% of Montreal Internet traffic.[15]
In 1992, Emtage, along withJ. Peter Deutsch and some financial help from McGill University, formedBunyip Information Systems with a licensed commercial version of the Archie search engine used by millions of people worldwide. Heelan followed them into Bunyip soon after, where he together withBibi Ali and Sandro Mazzucato significantly updated the Archie database and indexed web pages. Work on the search engine ceased in the late 1990s, and the company dissolved in 2003.[16]