'Reviving' Archie - the world's first search engine

After more than 3 decades, Archie almost disappeared, but he also left behind many legacies for the Internet search industry in particular and the technology world in general.

The content creators of YouTube channel 'The Serial Port' decided to 'revive' this tool with help from Alan Emtage - the father of Archie.

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

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

'Reviving' Archie - the world's first search engine Picture 1

After tireless efforts, The Serial Port team successfully found the final version of Archie. Many related documents have been made public by them. The team is also 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, a series of files, including the old "Antiword" application and manager, as well as password generator for OS/2 appear.

https://archie.serialport.org/

Alan Emtage says it's 'a happy ending to the story of preserving the early Internet'. He also hopes that more tools like Archie's will be preserved and honored in the future.

Jessica Tanner

Update 20 May 2024