First developed in 1989, Archie, the world’s first search engine, has been pulled from the dusty shelves of history. The youtube channel The Serial Port found the software of the search engine, all servers of which were offline, and after many years, got Archie working again.
‘Last copy’ of the software found archie
Archie, named after the abbreviation of the English word archive, was groundbreaking when it was developed at a time when the internet was limited. Because for the first time it allowed anonymous FTP servers to be searched on the Internet, which until then had only been used for universities, researchers and military purposes.
In other words, file transfers, which were limited or manual before this search engine, could now be done easily by anyone with access to the internet. With the rise of web-based search engines, people gradually forgot about Archie.
It was replaced by popular search engines like Google and Yahoo. The Serial Port, a YouTube channel that thinks that this lost search engine has an important place in the history of the internet and should be preserved, published a video on the subject.
In the video, the team, who were doing research to reuse Archie, finally reached Archie’s source codes with the help of a system administrator from the University of Warsaw. These codes were probably the last copy of Archie found on the internet.