FTP

archie,-the-internet’s-first-search-engine,-is-rescued-and-running

Archie, the Internet’s first search engine, is rescued and running

alan emtage, anonymous ftp, archie, Biz & IT, FTP, search engines, serial port, Tech, web search / /

Search for the Lost Searcher —

A journey through busted tapes, the Internet Old Farts Club, and SPARCstations.

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Screenshot from The Serial Port's Archie project showing an Archie prompt with orange text on a black screen.

The Serial Code/YouTube

It’s amazing, and a little sad, to think that something created in 1989 that changed how people used and viewed the then-nascent Internet had nearly vanished by 2024.

Nearly, that is, because the dogged researchers and enthusiasts at The Serial Port channel on YouTube have found what is likely the last existing copy of Archie. Archie, first crafted by Alan Emtage while a student at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, allowed for the searching of various “anonymous” FTP servers around what was then a very small web of universities, researchers, and government and military nodes. It was groundbreaking; it was the first echo of the “anything, anywhere” Internet to come. And when The Serial Port went looking, it very much did not exist.

The Serial Port’s journey from wondering where the last Archie server was to hosting its own.

While Archie would eventually be supplanted by Gopher, web portals, and search engines, it remains a useful way to index FTP sites and certainly should be preserved. The Serial Port did this, and the road to get there is remarkable and intriguing. You are best off watching the video of their rescue, along with its explanatory preamble. But I present here some notable bits of the tale, perhaps to tempt you into digging further.

The Serial Port notes the general loss of the Internet’s FTP era, including the recent shutdown of the Hobbes OS/2 Archive. Emtage, interviewed at length by the team, sent a tape copy of Archie to the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, but it was unrecoverable. Emtage’s company, Bunyip Information Systems, last sold version 3.5 of Archie’s server software for $6,000 in the mid-1990s (almost $12,000 today), and yet you can’t find it anywhere on the web. The Internet Archive wasn’t really running until 1996, just as Archie was fading from the web and, likely, memory.

The Serial Port team works dozens and dozens of resources to find a working copy of Archie’s code, including the Internet Old Farts Club on Facebook. I won’t give away the surprising source of their victory, but cheers (or na zdrowie) to the folks who keep old things running for everyone’s knowledge.

Kevin Purdy

Not only did The Serial Code rescue the last working version of Archie (seemingly a 3.5 beta), but they posted its docs and now run an actual Archie server on an emulated Sun SPARCstation 5. It’s currently indexing its own mirror of the Hobbes archive, along with the FTP sites for FreeBSD, Adobe, and D Bit emulation. Searching for “word” in Archie found me a bunch of files, including the classic “Antiword” app and password managers and generators for OS/2.

Emtage, who would later help define the Uniform Resource Locator (URL) standard, gave his blessing to The Serial Port’s efforts to recapture and preserve the code of Archie’s server. It’s a happy ending to a story about archiving the early Internet in a way that’s relevant to today, with hopefully more to come.

Listing image by The Serial Port/YouTube

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after-32-years,-one-of-the-’net’s-oldest-software-archives-is-shutting-down

After 32 years, one of the ’Net’s oldest software archives is shutting down

ancient servers, FTP, Hobbes, ibm, Internet Archive, internet history, Jason Scott, New Mexico State University, obsolete tech, Operating System, Operating Systems, OS/2, retrotech, Tech / /

Ancient server dept. —

Hobbes OS/2 Archive: “As of April 15th, 2024, this site will no longer exist.”

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Box art for IBM OS/2 Warp version 3, an OS released in 1995 that competed with Windows.

Enlarge / Box art for IBM OS/2 Warp version 3, an OS released in 1995 that competed with Windows.

IBM

In a move that marks the end of an era, New Mexico State University (NMSU) recently announced the impending closure of its Hobbes OS/2 Archive on April 15, 2024. For over three decades, the archive has been a key resource for users of the IBM OS/2 operating system and its successors, which once competed fiercely with Microsoft Windows.

In a statement made to The Register, a representative of NMSU wrote, “We have made the difficult decision to no longer host these files on hobbes.nmsu.edu. Although I am unable to go into specifics, we had to evaluate our priorities and had to make the difficult decision to discontinue the service.”

Hobbes is hosted by the Department of Information & Communication Technologies at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces, New Mexico. In the official announcement, the site reads, “After many years of service, hobbes.nmsu.edu will be decommissioned and will no longer be available. As of April 15th, 2024, this site will no longer exist.”

OS/2 version 1.2, released in late 1989.

OS/2 version 1.2, released in late 1989.

os2museum.com

We reached out to New Mexico State University to inquire about the history of the Hobbes archive but did not receive a response. The earliest record we’ve found of the Hobbes archive online is this 1992 Walnut Creek CD-ROM collection that gathered up the contents of the archive for offline distribution. At around 32 years old, minimum, that makes Hobbes one of the oldest software archives on the Internet, akin to the University of Michigan’s archives and ibiblio at UNC.

Archivists such as Jason Scott of the Internet Archive have stepped up to say that the files hosted on Hobbes are safe and already mirrored elsewhere. “Nobody should worry about Hobbes, I’ve got Hobbes handled,” wrote Scott on Mastodon in early January. OS/2 World.com also published a statement about making a mirror. But it’s still notable whenever such an old and important piece of Internet history bites the dust.

Like many archives, Hobbes started as an FTP site. “The primary distribution of files on the Internet were via FTP servers,” Scott tells Ars Technica. “And as FTP servers went down, they would also be mirrored as subdirectories in other FTP servers. Companies like CDROM.COM / Walnut Creek became ways to just get a CD-ROM of the items, but they would often make the data available at http://ftp.cdrom.com to download.”

The Hobbes site is a priceless digital time capsule. You can still find the Top 50 Downloads page, which includes sound and image editors, and OS/2 builds of the Thunderbird email client. The archive contains thousands of OS/2 games, applications, utilities, software development tools, documentation, and server software dating back to the launch of OS/2 in 1987. There’s a certain charm in running across OS/2 wallpapers from 1990, and even the archive’s Update Policy is a historical gem—last updated on March 12, 1999.

The legacy of OS/2

The final major IBM release of OS/2, Warp version 4.0, as seen running in an emulator.

Enlarge / The final major IBM release of OS/2, Warp version 4.0, as seen running in an emulator.

OS/2 began as a joint venture between IBM and Microsoft, undertaken as a planned replacement for IBM PC DOS (also called “MS-DOS” in the form sold by Microsoft for PC clones). Despite advanced capabilities like 32-bit processing and multitasking, OS/2 later competed with and struggled to gain traction against Windows. The partnership between IBM and Microsoft dissolved after the success of Windows 3.0, leading to divergent paths in OS strategies for the two companies.

Through iterations like the Warp series, OS/2 established a key presence in niche markets that required high stability, such as ATMs and the New York subway system. Today, its legacy continues in specialized applications and in newer versions (like eComStation) maintained by third-party vendors—despite being overshadowed in the broader market by Linux and Windows.

A footprint like that is worth preserving, and a loss of one of OS/2’s primary archives, even if mirrored elsewhere, is a cultural blow. Apparently, Hobbes has reportedly almost disappeared before but received a stay of execution. In the comments section for an article on The Register, someone named “TrevorH” wrote, “This is not the first time that Hobbes has announced it’s going away. Last time it was rescued after a lot of complaints and a number of students or faculty came forward to continue to maintain it.”

As the final shutdown approaches in April, the legacy of Hobbes is a reminder of the importance of preserving the digital heritage of software for future generations—so that decades from now, historians can look back and see how things got to where they are today.

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Inventor of NTP protocol that keeps time on billions of devices dies at age 85

1985, ARPANET, Biz & IT, Dave Mills, FTP, internet history, Internet pioneers, network time protocol, NSFNET, NTP, Ping, retrotech, Tech, The Internet, Vint Cerf / /

A legend in his own time —

Dave Mills created NTP, the protocol that holds the temporal Internet together, in 1985.

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A photo of David L. Mills taken by David Woolley on April 27, 2005.

Enlarge / A photo of David L. Mills taken by David Woolley on April 27, 2005.

David Woolley / Benj Edwards / Getty Images

On Thursday, Internet pioneer Vint Cerf announced that Dr. David L. Mills, the inventor of Network Time Protocol (NTP), died peacefully at age 85 on January 17, 2024. The announcement came in a post on the Internet Society mailing list after Cerf was informed of David’s death by Mills’ daughter, Leigh.

“He was such an iconic element of the early Internet,” wrote Cerf.

Dr. Mills created the Network Time Protocol (NTP) in 1985 to address a crucial challenge in the online world: the synchronization of time across different computer systems and networks. In a digital environment where computers and servers are located all over the world, each with its own internal clock, there’s a significant need for a standardized and accurate timekeeping system.

NTP provides the solution by allowing clocks of computers over a network to synchronize to a common time source. This synchronization is vital for everything from data integrity to network security. For example, NTP keeps network financial transaction timestamps accurate, and it ensures accurate and synchronized timestamps for logging and monitoring network activities.

In the 1970s, during his tenure at COMSAT and involvement with ARPANET (the precursor to the Internet), Mills first identified the need for synchronized time across computer networks. His solution aligned computers to within tens of milliseconds. NTP now operates on billions of devices worldwide, coordinating time across every continent, and has become a cornerstone of modern digital infrastructure.

As detailed in an excellent 2022 New Yorker profile by Nate Hopper, Mills faced significant challenges in maintaining and evolving the protocol, especially as the Internet grew in scale and complexity. His work highlighted the often under-appreciated role of key open source software developers (a topic explored quite well in a 2020 xkcd comic). Mills was born with glaucoma and lost his sight, eventually becoming completely blind. Due to difficulties with his sight, Mills turned over control of the protocol to Harlan Stenn in the 2000s.

A screenshot of Dr. David L. Mills' website at the University of Delaware captured on January 19, 2024.

Enlarge / A screenshot of Dr. David L. Mills’ website at the University of Delaware captured on January 19, 2024.

Aside from his work on NTP, Mills also invented the first “Fuzzball router” for NSFNET (one of the first modern routers, based on the DEC PDP-11 computer), created one of the first implementations of FTP, inspired the creation of “ping,” and played a key role in Internet architecture as the first chairman of the Internet Architecture Task Force.

Mills was widely recognized for his work, becoming a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery in 1999 and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in 2002, as well as receiving the IEEE Internet Award in 2013 for contributions to network protocols and timekeeping in the development of the Internet.

Mills received his PhD in Computer and Communication Sciences from the University of Michigan in 1971. At the time of his death, Mills was an emeritus professor at the University of Delaware, having retired in 2008 after teaching there for 22 years.

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