Oh I remember Archie!<p>There was always a story it was named after the comic, and after it there were the Veronica and Jughead systems which were named the same way. I just checked then and Wikipedia says he didn't name it after the comic and hated it. So there goes another 1990's myth.<p>Archie itself actually never worked very well, but nothing did in those days so we were amazed when it actually returned a result.
HN is sometimes one of the more progressive wings of the geek community. It's disheartening to see the number of replies expressing dismay at race being an interesting and notable part of this story. Representation is a crucial concept in history and media, and a key element in why conversations about privilege are necessary.<p>Rather than stating that you don't know why it would be relevant to mention the man's race, why don't you just actually ask yourself the question? Why does it matter that he is black? You all are great problem solvers. I think you can come up with some interesting answers.
Here's the 1990 USENET announcement of "archie".[1] This wasn't a full text search engine. It just collected what it got from "ls".<p><i>"Alan has a set of shell scripts that automagically calls
up some subset of our list of servers each night (to keep
load down on any one machine) and do a remote 'ls' on that
machine. We cycle through the entire list in about a
month, so no entry can be more than that old. For what
it's worth, we currently know of about 210 sites."</i><p><i>Archie allows anyone to rlogin into one of our machines
and query our archive lists. Another one of my guys, (Bill
Heelan, whe...@cs.mcgill.ca) wrote a bare-bones front
end, which allows people to login, get a help message, ask
for a specific string (using ed-like regular expressions)
or get the contents of a specific archive server.</i><p><i>Currently, archie is pretty brain-damaged. The files are
stored as flat ASCII files and the "prog" command just
launches a "grep" with the appropriate arguments. Future
plans (once we get the latest start of semester out of the
way) is to add a real database (we've compiled postgres
(sp?) and Alan has started to code the program to parse
the raw input).</i><p>So that was Archie. That's like a library shelf list, or Active Directory, not a search engine.<p>Long before WWW search engines, there were computerized keyword and catalog databases. The US National Library of Medicine (MEDLARS) and Mead Data Central (later Lexis/Nexis) were early big ones. Big libraries also had online catalogs by 1990.<p>AltaVista was the first big full-text search engine. AltaVista was in the old telco building behind the Walgreens in Palo Alto. where PAIX is now. AltaVista was built as a demo of DEC Alpha servers. It was the first data center built telco-style, on open racks with the cables overhead. This was because they had the racks in place, but it became a trend.<p>[1] <a href="https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/comp.archives/LWVA50W8BKk/wyRbF_lDc6cJ" rel="nofollow">https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/comp.archives/LWVA50W8...</a>
I loved Archie and it was still useful for a good year or two after the weww got going. Nice to finally learn who was behind it - back then people rarely shared photos of themselves since they took forever to download.
I vaguely remember Archie. On the topic of early web search, does anyone remember "Jump Stations"? They were basically collections of curated web links (as I recall, 25 years out now).
Was just thinking this earlier this week, can anything, at this point, hold a candle to Google in terms of search? Or possibly compete well with it such that people could switch?<p>Recently heard about the news Google is discontinuing enterprise site search, not that that is such a huge problem, but it's just another example of the issues that arise from having a monopoly control everything with no alternatives. They can pull the plug and everyone is left lacking.
One of the things I love on the old Internet is how people took off with the Archie theme on other search engines. Gopher's main search engine was Veronica (Very Easy Rodent Oriented Internet Something Something). I also recall a Jughead search engine.<p>The second generation search engines killed the theme off (Altavista, Lycos, Webcrawler, Infoseek, etc...), but it was fun while it lasted.
Neat.<p>I clearly recall connecting to archie.au and archie.nz to do (slow-ass!) searches back in the late 1980s and early 1990s.<p>Why those? Easy to remember!
Sad to see some people here be upset at the harmless mention of a subject's race. Though it is proof positive to me that even a community as dedicated towards intellectual pursuits like Hacker News has its fair share of regressive elements as well.
This escalated quickly. But I would actually somewhat side with the commenters saying that it is odd to explicitly mention the race in the article. I get that it is Black History Month in the US and in that context it seems appropriate but I would question whether having a Black History Month is a good idea in the first place.<p>It is not obvious to me that explicitly pointing out a distinction is the best way to get rid of said distinction, be it black or white, male or female, gay or straight. It is a historical accident that one of the groups in each case was at a disadvantage in the past and that this continuous on to today with the gap narrowing slower than one may want.<p>So I understand that it seems warranted to give the disadvantaged group special attention to close the gap as fast as possible. But does this necessarily require pointing out the distinction in the way this article or Black History Month does? Sure, any program targeting a specific group can not totally avoid making use of the addressed distinction, but would it not be better to keep this as inconspicuous as possible?
the OP here. as it seems there are some queries in peoples' mind re: the article's title; I am copying below the author's thoughts (from her social media feed) about the article, which I think is useful.<p>"My latest piece for JSTOR Daily looks at a hugely influential technologist who is strangely absent from most lists of Black inventors. Alan Emtage invented the world's first search engine -- so I look at the massive impact of search, not only on how the web works, but how our brains work, too."<p>P.s. Am notifying the author about the discussion here. If she has time & so inclined, to engage.<p>P.p.s. as for myself, I was hoping to see interesting HN discussion about search before pre-Google, & how search is affecting our brain + thinking process.
Unfortunate title, since it's already dragging this into flamey territory...<p>Any good information on the actual search engine? I'd never heard of it, it's before my time. TFA has about two paragraphs about it before bloviating into a philosophical discourse on the effect of search technology on society.
Reading "black technologist" my first thoughts goes to some malicious figure in a science-fantasy novel, not the color of ones skin. What is next, "the yellow programmer"?<p>I'm so glad I don't define who I am based on my skin color. Is the color of your skin of any importance when we are talking about your achievements? If he was white, would making the first search engine be less remarkable?
I don't understand why one would point out a person's race (unless it's relevant to the situaiton), but since the title did...<p>I cannot fanthom how anyone could call this person "black". If anything, his complexion is similar to what US people call "hispanic" (although to me that's just southern European, not a distinct race).