The Serial Port YouTube channel found almost the last working copy of Archie, the first search engine on the network, created in 1989 by Alan Emtage during his studies at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. It allowed to search on FTP servers in what was then a very small network of universities, researchers, government, and military servers, the beginning of the future Internet.
Despite the fact that Archie was subsequently displaced by Gopher, web portals, and search engines, it remained a useful way to index FTP servers, and in the opinion of The Serial Port, deserves to live on. The channel made a detailed video about searching and working with the program.
Emtage told researchers in an interview that he sent a copy of Archie on magnetic tape to the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California - but it was impossible to restore. Emtage's company, Bunyip Information Systems, last sold version 3.5 of the Archie server software for $6,000 in the mid-1990s (almost $12,000 today), but now it cannot be found anywhere on the Internet. YouTubers worked with a variety of resources to find a working copy of the Archie code, and in the end they succeeded.
The Serial Port not only saved the last working version of Archie (it was beta version 3.5), but also published its documentation and now runs a working Archie server on an emulated Sun SPARCstation 5. Emtage, involved in creating the Uniform Resource Locator (URL) standard, blessed the channel's efforts to restore and preserve the Archie server code.
Source: ArsTecnica
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