archie

Archie was one of the first file search programs on the Internet that was able to search the files of all registered anonymous FTP archives on the Internet. All you had to do was specify a search term and you received a list of all those FTP servers(Archie servers) that had archived files with that search term in the file name as a response.

To reduce the load on the Internet, before starting an Anonymous FTP session, one asked Archie for a nearby server that had the desired file in stock. Archie could be queried either in a telnet session to the Archie server or via ASCII or X Window clients. Once the desired file had been located, it could be downloaded to the local computer system using the FTP protocol.

Archie played a minor role compared to other search engines and was discontinued.