Back in the innocent days of the late 1980s the Internet as we know it today did not exist yet, but there were still plenty of FTP servers. Since manually keeping track of all of the files on those FTP server would be a royal pain, [Alan Emtage] set to work in 1986 to create an indexing and search service called Archie to streamline this process. As a local tool, it’d regularly fetch the file listing from FTP servers in a list, making this available for easy local search.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://hackaday.com/2024/05/20/finding-and-resurrecting-archie-the-internets-first-search-engine/