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Archie was the first internet search engine, created in 1990 by Alan Emtage at McGill University, to index files on anonymous File Transfer Protocol (FTP) servers, allowing users to find and download files by knowing their names or parts of their names. It was a command-line tool that connected to a network of Archie servers, which maintained catalogs of files available on public FTP sites worldwide. Users would query an Archie server for a file name, and the server would return a list of FTP sites where the file could be found.

Key characteristics of Archie:

Purpose: To find files on FTP servers, a precursor to the modern web.

Name Origin: Derived from the word "archive" without the "v".

Functionality: It indexed file and directory names from FTP sites, creating a searchable database.

Limitations: Users needed to know the file name or a substring of it, as Archie did not index file content.

Evolution: Archie was a foundational concept for later search engines and other Internet tools.

Accessibility: It was accessed via Telnet, e-mail, or a specific Archie client program.