In 1989, Alan Emtage conceived of and implemented Archie, the world’s first Internet search engine, as a graduate student at McGill University in Montreal.
As a systems administrator in the university’s information technology department, it was his job to find software for students and faculty members—which at that time involved manually digging around the various FTP (File Transfer Protocol) servers scattered across the nascent internet.
To save his own time, he wrote some code that would do the searching for him and named his FTP search engine “ARCHIE” (after “archive”, without the “v”.) In doing so, he pioneered many of the techniques used by public search engines today.
Happy Black History Month!!
For more information, click Black In Tech – Alan Emtage
Contact Information
Jessica Wright
Email : jmwright@pvamu.edu