In the wake of deteriorating search engines, The Serial Port decided to bring back Archie, the Internet’s first search engine. The above video explains how they did it and the inspiration behind the work.
The Serial Port notes the general loss of the Internet’s FTP era, including the recent shutdown of the Hobbes OS/2 Archive. Emtage, interviewed at length by the team, sent a tape copy of Archie to the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, but it was unrecoverable. Emtage’s company, Bunyip Information Systems, last sold version 3.5 of Archie’s server software for $6,000 in the mid-1990s (almost $12,000 today), and yet you can’t find it anywhere on the web. The Internet Archive wasn’t really running until 1996, just as Archie was fading from the web and, likely, memory.
The Serial Port team works dozens and dozens of resources to find a working copy of Archie’s code, including the Internet Old Farts Club on Facebook […]
via Ars Technica
Archie won’t replace Google (or Bing or whatever you use) but it’s nice to see so many alternatives popping up, old and new.
Filed under: history search engines video