Archie, The Very First Search Engine, Was Released 30 Years Ago Today:
On Archie's 30th anniversary, we salute the world's first search engine, a pioneer that paved the way for giants to come.
Archie was first released to the general public on Sept. 10, 1990. It was developed as a school project by Alan Emtage at McGill University in Montreal.
According to an interview with Digital Archaeology, Emtage had been working as a grad student in 1989 in the university's information technology department. His job required him to find software for other students and faculty. He wrote some code to do this, which later came to be known as Archie. Bill Heelan and Peter Deutsch also were key in Archie's development, as they wrote the script that allowed others to log on and use the search engine.
Archie didn't exactly look like the search engines we know now. When users logged on, they found a text-based landing page with a couple of search parameter options -- no ads or interactive graphics like what we're used to these days.
In the early days of the internet, Archie (archive without the "v") was actually just an index of File Transfer Protocol (FTP) sites. [..] Once you found what you thought you were looking for with Archie, you'd have to download the file before you could see what was inside.
(Score: 0, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 11 2020, @04:01AM (2 children)
most of this reads exactly like the Wikipedia entry for Archie
(Score: 2) by gtomorrow on Friday September 11 2020, @08:04AM
No...Creative Commons!
I Can't Believe It's Not Butter!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 11 2020, @12:49PM
You mean in the sense that it contains the same basic facts? Yes it does. Plagarized? Not even close.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 11 2020, @05:03AM (2 children)
Hey, I remember using Archie, and Gopher, and Pine, and a few times Veronica. But then, I am very old, so it is not surprising. We used to write on wax tablets, with sticks (styli), and we liked it! And we used carbon black inks, or Iron Gall, on papyrus, since paper had not been introduced from China, yet, and we liked that, too! Kids these days with their graphical, video modes of communication, it is like they cannot understand geocentrism unless there is a tik-tok of it. Well, back then, it was all text, there was nothing but the text, and we were all Derridians, reading through the erasure and de-coding the White Mythology.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 11 2020, @06:57AM
I still use (al)pine.
Not all archies were equal. I found Archie.unl.edu and archie.au (plaza.aarnet.edu.au) to be the best, but the Australians then stopped foreign traffic, because Telstra was buttraping them on their international connections.
(Score: 2) by drussell on Friday September 11 2020, @12:59PM
Indeed... As a pre-WWW internet user myself, I feel extra> old now....
And yes, I still always use pine for e-mail, running right on the server. (Well, "alpine" now...)
It's extremely efficient.
(Score: 2) by istartedi on Friday September 11 2020, @05:50AM (4 children)
And to celebrate, Soylent is randomly displaying a 1990s web page to me. Seriously, is anybody else having this issue?
Anyway, to stay on topic, I do indeed have some memory of Archie, along with Gopher back in the early 90s when I had access to my school's Sun workstations, running the first decent GUI I ever saw!
Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
(Score: 4, Touché) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Friday September 11 2020, @06:30AM (2 children)
Yes, it's called SoylentNews.
If you want to see an even more historical webpage, try to hit Slashdot.
(Score: 3, Funny) by gtomorrow on Friday September 11 2020, @08:11AM
Tangentially Off-topic: not too long ago, I sent a link to an article here to my <25-year-old niece, thinking the subject might be of interest to her.
She wrote back saying "is that from the Nineties?" 🤣
P.S. SoylentNews staff -- DON'T LISTEN TO HER!
(Score: 1) by istartedi on Friday September 11 2020, @06:57PM
LOL, no. I guess I'd have to post a screenshot. The burnt-orange title bars, the formatting, *all* of it was gone. Every link was blue, the background was stark white.
Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday September 11 2020, @02:22PM
My first internet file transfer used Kermit... that was quite the hassle, but the only option offered by Mentor Graphics for our lowly Academic licensed site to get updates to their (defective) CAD/CAM tools.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Funny) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Friday September 11 2020, @06:27AM
no ads or interactive graphics like what we're used to these days.
Thank God we've evolved from that. It's so much better today.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 11 2020, @06:35AM (5 children)
> ...you'd have to download the file before you could see what was inside.
Unlike files these days.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Friday September 11 2020, @06:56AM (4 children)
With today's search engines, you usually get a short excerpt of the linked page directly in the search results, so you can get a rough idea what to expect to find in that page.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by choose another one on Friday September 11 2020, @12:16PM
*.com/.co*
90% adverts
10% content, maybe, on a good day, 1% might be relevant
*.gov*
approx:
50% irrelevant content
50% relevant content, maybe, on a good day, behind the error messages
No search engine required...
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday September 11 2020, @02:25PM (2 children)
With today's ping and transfer speeds, you can see the contents of a 1990s FTP file in the time it takes for your mouse button to move from the contact-made back to the contact-broken state.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Friday September 11 2020, @04:53PM (1 child)
That still leaves the time you need to move the mouse pointer onto the link to click it. This time is human-limited, and therefore is improved neither by faster computers, not by faster network connections. And it remains a truth that repositioning the focus of your eyes is much faster than changing the position of your mouse hand (and a touch interface doesn't help here either, as you still have to move your hand).
Maybe if one day computers are generally equipped with eye-tracking technology, that hand-latency will go away. Until then, text included in the page will always be accessed more quickly than text which is a click away.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 3, Funny) by JoeMerchant on Friday September 11 2020, @06:33PM
But, what's the interplay with the ever shrinking attention span?
In the time it takes me to write this, I already don't care...
🌻🌻 [google.com]