If Archie, Veronica and Jughead Can Surf the Net, When Will We?
At the same time that WAIS and W3 were being developed (1991-1992), the “archie” server program was written by Peter Deutsch, Alan Emtage, Bill Heelan, and Mike Parker at the Computing Centre, McGill University in Quebec (Canada). Archie is a user application for AIX operating systems, and can perform a search for keywords in all of the file names available from the Internet’s anonymous file-transfer-protocol (FTP) servers. Deutsch described it as follows: “The archie service is a collection of resource discovery tools that together provide an electronic directory service for locating information in an Internet environment. Originally created to track the contents of anonymous FTP archive sites, the archie service is now being expanded to include a variety of other online directories and resource listings. Currently, archie tracks the contents of over 800 anonymous FTP archive sites containing some 1,000,000 files throughout the Internet. Collectively, these files represent well over 5
