Old Enough to Remember This

Needs an Indiana Jones Hat When I first discovered the internet, the "World Wide Web" was new, and people were unsure if it would last.

In fact, more people used a text based interface called Gopher.  (About 6 months later, the web passed Gopher, and never looked back).

There was also an older internet protocol, used to scour FTP sites, called Archie, which I used once or twice before it went away. (IIRC, it was a web portal to Archie)

I thought that it was gone, but, to quote Humphrey Bogart, "I was misinformed." 

The folks at the YouTube channel "The Serial Port" found a copy and have put it back online.

It's amazing, and a little sad, to think that something created in 1989 that changed how people used and viewed the then-nascent Internet had nearly vanished by 2024.

Nearly, that is, because the dogged researchers and enthusiasts at The Serial Port channel on YouTube have found what is likely the last existing copy of Archie. Archie, first crafted by Alan Emtage while a student at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, allowed for the searching of various "anonymous" FTP servers around what was then a very small web of universities, researchers, and government and military nodes. It was groundbreaking; it was the first echo of the "anything, anywhere" Internet to come. And when The Serial Port went looking, it very much did not exist.

………

The Serial Port team works dozens and dozens of resources to find a working copy of Archie's code, including the Internet Old Farts Club on Facebook. I won't give away the surprising source of their victory, but cheers (or na zdrowie) to the folks who keep old things running for everyone's knowledge.

Not only did The Serial Port rescue the last working version of Archie (seemingly a 3.5 beta), but they posted its docs and now run an actual Archie server on an emulated Sun SPARCstation 5. It's currently indexing its own mirror of the Hobbes archive, along with the FTP sites for FreeBSD, Adobe, and D Bit emulation. Searching for "word" in Archie found me a bunch of files, including the classic "Antiword" app and password managers and generators for OS/2.

I think that this is kind of cool, in a profoundly geeky way. 

Text based interface baby, that's hardcore.