Alan Emtage, (born November 27, 1964) conceived and implemented the first version of Archie, a pre-Web internet search engine for locating material in public FTP archives.

• The author originally wanted to call the program “archives,” but had to shorten it to comply with the Unix world standard of assigning programs and files short, cryptic names such as grep, cat, troff, sed, awk, perl, and so on.

A native of Barbados, and the son of Sir Stephen and Lady Emtage, he attended high school at Harrison College from 1975 to 1983 (and in 1981 becoming the owner of a Sinclair ZX81 with 1K of memory), where he graduated at the top of his class, winning the Barbados Scholarship.

I cycled across London to get 16k of RAM upgrade

In 1983 he entered McGill University in Montreal, Canada studying for an honors Bachelor’s degree in computer science which was followed by a Master’s degree in 1987 from which he graduated in 1991. Emtage was part of the team that brought the first Internet link to eastern Canada (and only the second link in the country) in 1986. In 1989 while a student and working as a systems administrator for the School of Computer Science, Emtage conceived and implemented the original version of the Archie search engine, the world’s first Internet search engine and the start of a line which leads directly to today’s Altavista, Yahoo!, and Google.

45 years old in a couple of weeks.

• 105,170,327 active web surfers in the US
• In Europe 105,096,093
• Asia 704,213,930 Internet users
• Latin America and The Caribbean 175,834,439

I make that 2,180,629,578 oh, and I’ve got two computers so 2,180,629,579.

To Get The Ball Rolling……

Fight! Fight! Fight!

C O N I F I G U R A T I O N

In the Beginning Was the Command Line

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