'Reviving' the world's first search engine

A group of content creators on YouTube have rediscovered and "revived" the final version of Archie - the world's first search engine .

Archie was created by computer scientist Alan Emtage in 1989, when he was a student at McGill University in Montreal (Canada). This tool allows searching for many different "anonymous" FTP servers around a small web of universities, researchers, governments and the military.

Archie is considered the world's first search engine. (Photo: The Serial Code/Youtube).

Over more than 3 decades, Archie almost disappeared, giving way to the appearance of highly flexible tools such as Google, Bing, Yahoo.

However, the legacy Archie left behind for the Internet search industry in particular and the technology world in general is undeniable. This prompted the content creators of YouTube channel 'The Serial Port' to 'revive' this tool. It was an exciting journey with help from Alan Emtage - Archie's father.

According to Emtage, he sent a tape containing a copy of Archie to the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. But the tape cannot be recovered.

Archie 3.5 – the final version of Archie released in the mid-1990s for $6,000 (nearly $12,000 today). However, this version is not really popular and almost completely disappeared from the web after 1996.

Archie's interface.

The Serial Port team has searched countless documents in hopes of finding Archie's remaining traces. They even infiltrated the 'Internet Old Farts Club' group on Facebook, which brings together people passionate about learning about the history of the Internet around the world.

Thanks to their tireless efforts, the research team successfully found the final version of Archie. They also published many related documents and are operating a server running Archie on an emulated Sun SPARCstation 5 workstation. Within this, Archie supports indexing for copies of Hobbes repositories, along with FTP sites for FreeBSD, Adobe, and D Bit emulation. When trying to search for the word "word" on Archie, users receive a series of files, including the old "Antiword" application and manager, as well as password generator for OS/2.

Alan Emtage seemed delighted with this achievement. He said it was 'a happy ending to the story of preserving the early Internet' and hoped that more tools like Archie would be preserved and honored in the future.