====== Archie ======

| **Field** | Internet Search Tools |
| **Went Obsolete** | late 1990s |
| **Made Obsolete By** | The World-Wide Web and modern search engines |
| **Knowledge Assumed** | Use of the archie client, a need to find things in public FTP archives |
| **When useful** | No longer useful now. Everything Archie did can be done through modern search engines |

Archie was created around 1990 as a way to make finding files on the rapidly growing list of FTP servers easier. Archie would index the contents of various large public FTP servers periodically, and the results could then be searched without needing to log into several different FTP servers to try to find the files you were looking for. Tim Berners-Lee began working on the basic elements (a web browser, a web server, and a protocol to transfer data stored on a web server to browsers) of the World-Wide Web in 1990 and the first web server was launched in 1991.

As the Web expanded in reach and functionality, search engines were created to index the massive amount of data that that was being published online. These engines eventually included the ability to search public FTP archives.

Archie usage began to decline as Web usage increased and it eventually suffered the same fate of obsolescence as Gopher and WAIS.