A group of YouTube content creators has rediscovered and “revived” the final version of Archie – the world’s first search engine.
Archie, created by computer scientist Alan Emtage in 1989 while he was a student at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, allowed users to search various “anonymous” FTP servers around a small web of universities, researchers, government, and military.
Archie is considered the world’s first search engine. (Image: The Serial Code/YouTube).
Over three decades, Archie nearly faded away, giving way to the emergence of more flexible search tools like Google, Bing, and Yahoo.
However, the legacy left by Archie to the internet search industry and the tech world in general is undeniable. This has inspired the content creators of the YouTube channel The Serial Port to “revive” this tool. It has been an exciting journey, aided by Alan Emtage, the creator of Archie.
According to Emtage, he sent a tape containing a copy of Archie to the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. However, the tape could not be recovered.
Archie 3.5 – the final version of Archie was released in the mid-1990s at a cost of $6,000 (nearly $12,000 today). However, this version was not widely popular and virtually disappeared from the web after 1996.
The interface of Archie.
The The Serial Port team has searched through countless documents in hopes of finding remnants of Archie. They even infiltrated the “Internet Old Farts Club” on Facebook, which gathers enthusiasts interested in the history of the internet worldwide.
Thanks to their relentless efforts, the research team successfully located the final version of Archie. They have also made many related documents public and are operating a server running Archie on a simulated Sun SPARCstation 5. In this environment, Archie indexes a copy of the Hobbes archive, along with FTP pages to simulate FreeBSD, Adobe, and D Bit. When searching for the term “word” on Archie, users receive a list of files, including the old “Antiword” application and its manager, as well as password creation for OS/2.
Alan Emtage expressed joy at this achievement. He believes it is “a happy ending to the story of preserving the early internet” and hopes that more tools like Archie will be preserved and honored in the future.
