Definition: Archie

(ARCHIvE) An earlier Unix utility that searched for file names on Internet FTP sites. Often touted as the first search engine, in its heyday before the Web, there were approximately 30 Archie servers throughout the Internet that maintained catalogs of files available for downloading from various FTP sites. Periodically, Archie servers searched the FTP sites and indexed the names of the files they found. In 2013, a Polish university offered the last known Archie search (http://archie.icm.edu.pl/archie-adv_eng.html). See FTP.

The Inventor of Archie
Barbados born Alan Emtage developed Archie in 1989, named for Archive (without the "v"), when he was a student and systems administrator at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. Within a couple months, half the Internet traffic in Canada was going through the first Archie server.