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WHAT IS ARCHIE?
Archie is an electronic directory service for the Internet's anonymous File Transfer Protocol (FTP) sites. Curtis Simmonds described archie as "an online union catalog of 'electronic' holdings of many anonymous FTP archive sites"[1]. Archie was developed at McGill University by Alan Emtage, Bill Heelan, Peter Deutsch and others. It is maintained at McGill and is also being significantly enhanced by Bunyip Information Systems, a company that Deutsch and Emtage established to continue their work with archie.
Gateways to archie now exist from the World-Wide Web and WAIS in addition to access by UNIX, e-mail, telnet and Internet gopher as covered by the Simmonds article. Bunyip now describes archie as "a network-based information tool offering proactive data retrieval and indexing for widely distributed collections of data"[2]. Bunyip has embarked on an ambitious program of enhancing archie's features to make it a tool for generalized information gathering and distributed database maintenance. New features will enable archie to index Internet resources available via many protocols, not just the Internet's FTP. With these enhancements, archie is being moved out into the world of Internet commerce.
Archie has two parts. The first is called the Data-Gathering Component. This part goes and gets the information that will be indexed and retrieved. The second part, the UserAccess Component, allows an Internet user to interact with the index to retrieve information from more than 1,000 FTP servers containing more than 2.5 million files. This latter feature has been so successful that archie servers process more than 50,000 queries per day.
Recent additions that allow hypertext navigation and document previewing, such as ArchiePlex[3], are very welcome. But no enhancement is more welcome than an archie client for the Macintosh. Why? First, it's a point and click application with the familiar feel of the Macintosh. Second, and more importantly, unlike many other approaches to archie that tie up the application being used (and sometimes your machine), these archie clients for the Mac can run in the background while you go about your work. Since remote archie queries can be among the slowest on the network as they work their way through the queue, this is welcome relief. (Note: Despite their slowness, client searches are kinder to the network because the archie server...