Love the Archie comeback, but fuck arstechnica and their fucked up site format. They literally call themselves the „Art of Technology“ and can’t even get their website properly formatted for mobile. Pathetic.
iOS Safari. The scaling is utterly fucked up. The page displays just half the width on load right off the bat. As one pinches to zoom out to get the full width, the font scales so small, it’s unreadable without zooming back in to half width. The site is peppered with ads to boot to add insult to injury. I don’t even try to hang around, good riddance.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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