Archie is a tool for indexing FTP archives, allowing users to more easily identify specific files. It is considered the first Internet
search engine
A search engine is a software system designed to carry out web searches. They search the World Wide Web in a systematic way for particular information specified in a textual web search query. The search results are generally presented in a ...
. The original implementation was written in 1990 by
Alan Emtage
Alan Emtage (born November 27, 1964) is a Barbadians, Bajan-Canadians, Canadian computer scientist who conceived and implemented the first version of Archie search engine, Archie, a pre-World Wide Web, Web Internet search engine for locating mat ...
, then a postgraduate student at McGill University in Montreal, Canada.
Archie has since been superseded by other, more sophisticated search engines, including Jughead and Veronica. These were in turn superseded by search engines like Yahoo! in 1995 and Google in 1997. Work on Archie ceased in the late 1990s. A legacy Archie server is still maintained active for historic purposes in Poland at University of Warsaw's
Interdisciplinary Centre for Mathematical and Computational Modelling
Interdisciplinary Centre for Mathematical and Computational Modelling (ICM) is a supercomputing
A supercomputer is a computer with a high level of performance as compared to a general-purpose computer. The performance of a supercomputer i ...
.
Origin
Archie began as a project for students and volunteer staff at the
McGill University School of Computer Science
The School of Computer Science (SOCS) is an academic department in the Faculty of Science at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. The school is the second most funded computer science department in Canada. It currently has 34 faculty ...
in 1987, when Peter Deutsch (systems manager for the School), Alan Emtage, and Bill Heelan were asked to connect the School to the Internet.
The name derives from the word "archive" without the v. Emtage has said that contrary to popular belief, there was no association with the
Archie Comics
Archie Comic Publications, Inc., is an American comic book publisher headquartered in Pelham, New York.Jughead and Veronica were named after characters from the comics. Anarchie, one of the earliest graphical FTP clients was named for its ability to perform Archie searches.
How Archie worked
The earliest versions of Archie would simply search a list of public anonymous File Transfer Protocol (FTP) sites using the Telnet protocol and create an index of the FTP files. FTP is essentially a way to transfer files between computers. 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) and requested a listing. These listings were stored in local files to be searched using the Unix command.
The developers populated the engine's servers with databases of anonymous FTP host directories. This was used to find specific file titles since the list was plugged in to a searchable database of FTP sites. 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 first introduced by Gopher.
Development
Emtage and Heelan wrote a script allowing people to log in and search collected information using the Telnet protocol at the host "archie.mcgill.ca"
32.206.2.3
3 (three) is a number, numeral (linguistics), numeral and numerical digit, digit. It is the natural number following 2 and preceding 4, and is the smallest odd prime number and the only prime preceding a square number. It has religious or cu ...
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 the Internet. The collected data would be exchanged between the neighbouring Archie servers. The servers could be accessed in multiple ways: using a local client (such as ''archie'' or ''xarchie''); telnetting to a server directly; sending queries by electronic mail; and later via a World Wide Web interface. At the zenith of its fame the Archie search engine accounted for 50% of Montreal Internet traffic.
In 1992, Emtage along with Deutsch and some financial help of McGill University formed Bunyip Information Systems the world's first company expressly founded for and dedicated to providing Internet information services 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 with Bibi Ali and Sandro Mazzucato was a part of so-called Archie Group. The group significantly updated the archie database and indexed web-pages. Work on the search engine ceased in the late 1990s.
*Archie—A Darwinian Development Process. Peter Deutsch. IEEE Internet Computing, January/February 2000, 4(1):69-71. Part of Millennial Forecasts, .
*P. Deutsch, A. Emtage, A. Marine ''How to Use Anonymous FTP'' (RFC1635, May 1994)