The YouTube channel The Serial Port has found perhaps the last working copy of Archie, the first search engine on the web, created in 1989 by Alan Amtedge while studying at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. It allowed searching FTP servers in what was then a very small network of universities, researchers, government and military servers, the beginning of the future Internet.
Although Archie was later supplanted by Gopher, web portals, and search engines, it remained a useful way to index FTP servers, and according to The Serial Port, it deserves to live on. The channel made a detailed video on how to find and work with the program.
In an interview with the researchers, Emtage said that he sent a copy of Archie on magnetic tape 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 the Archie server software for $6000 in the mid-1990s (almost $12,000 today), but it is currently not available anywhere on the Internet. YouTubers have been working through a variety of resources to find a working copy of the Archie code, and they eventually succeeded.
The Serial Port not only rescued the last working version of Archie (it was beta 3.5), but also published its documentation and is now running a working Archie server on an emulated Sun SPARCstation 5. The estate, which was involved in the creation of the Uniform Resource Locator (URL) standard, has blessed the channel’s efforts to recover and preserve the Archie server code.
Source: ArsTecnica
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