Archie (search engine) facts for kids
Screenshot of Archie
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| Original author(s) | Alan Emtage |
|---|---|
| Developer(s) | Bunyip Information Systems, Inc. |
| Initial release | 10 September 1990 |
| Last release |
3.5 / 1996
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| Written in | C |
| Operating system | Solaris, AIX |
| Type | Web search engine |
Archie was a special computer program. It helped people find files on the internet. Many people think it was the very first Internet search engine. A student named Alan Emtage created it in 1990. He was studying at McGill University in Montreal, Canada.
Later, newer and better search engines came along. These included Jughead and Veronica. They helped search for information using something called the Gopher protocol. Even newer search engines like Yahoo! (in 1995) and Google (in 1998) eventually took over. Work on Archie stopped in the late 1990s. For many years, a special Archie server was kept running in Poland. It was at the Interdisciplinary Centre for Mathematical and Computational Modelling in the University of Warsaw. This server was kept for historical reasons until 2023.
With help from the University of Warsaw, a new Archie server was made. It became available to everyone on May 11, 2024. You can find it at The Serial Port, which is a website about old computers.
Contents
The Start of Archie: How It Began
Archie first appeared in 1986. At that time, Alan Emtage was a systems manager at McGill University. The university wanted to connect to the internet. But it was very expensive. It cost about $35,000 each year for a slow connection to Boston. It was hard to convince people that this cost was worth it.
The name "Archie" comes from the word "archive." It's just "archive" without the letter 'v'. Alan Emtage has said that it has nothing to do with Archie Comics. But it's interesting that other early internet search tools were named after characters from those comics. These included Jughead and Veronica. Also, Anarchie, an early program for finding files, was named because it could do Archie searches.
How Archie Worked: Finding Files Online
The first versions of Archie looked through public FTP sites. FTP sites are places where people store files online. Archie used a method called Telnet to do this. It created special lists of files. You could then get these lists using FTP. To see what was inside a file, you had to download it first.
Archie updated its lists regularly. It would check each FTP site about once a month. This way, it didn't use too many resources from the other servers. It would ask for a list of files from each site. These lists were saved on Archie's own computers. Then, people could search these lists using a special command called grep.
Archie's developers filled its servers with databases. These databases had lists of files from anonymous FTP sites. This helped users find specific file names. Archie could not understand normal questions. It also didn't look inside the files themselves. So, you had to know the exact name of the file you wanted. Later, the Gopher system added the ability to search inside files.
Developing Archie: Making It Better
Alan Emtage and Bill Heelan wrote a program. It let people log in and search the collected information. You could do this using Telnet at "archie.mcgill.ca." Later, they made the system work even better. It grew from a tool used only at McGill to a popular service. Many places on the internet offered Archie. The information collected by Archie was shared between different Archie servers.
You could use Archie in many ways. You could use a special program on your computer, like archie or xarchie. You could also connect directly to an Archie server using telnet. You could even send your search questions by electronic mail. Later, there was a way to use Archie through the World Wide Web. When Archie was most popular, it accounted for half of all internet traffic in Montreal!
In 1992, Emtage, along with Peter Deutsch, started a company. It was called Bunyip Information Systems. McGill University helped them financially. This company sold a commercial version of the Archie search engine. Millions of people around the world used it. Bill Heelan joined Bunyip soon after. He, along with Bibi Ali and Sandro Mazzucato, made big improvements to the Archie database. They also started indexing web pages. Work on the search engine stopped in the late 1990s. The company closed down in 2003.
See also
- Alan Emtage
- Jughead
- Veronica
- Wide area information server
