I was not even using gopher until 92 and did not use a graphical interface to the internet until at least 96 but maybe 97 or 98.
Used it all the time in the early 90s. Even though the tech was very primitive back then, I miss the academic spirit and open collaborative nature of it all. Corporate greed has really wrecked the open web.
corporate greed has ruined the world
Archive, Veronica, and Gopher… The Usenet trio
Why not link to it? Here we go:
Working online Archie Search Instance
Anyone wants to explain the niceness selector?
Aaaaand it was hugged to death
Cool that Lemmy has enough users to DDOS but darn it, I wanted a hit of nostalgia
Google search so bad now, people are trying Archie again. Funny/sad!
Technology is cyclical
Can we revive Alta Vista and Ask Jeeves?
The future is HotBot, baby!
Pretty sure Ask Jeeves is still around, but from what I understand it’s basically useless.
A day later, and it’s still too swamped to let me in… I’ll keep trying, though.
It was also the name of an insane computer intelligence in a tabletop RPG game called RIFTS by Palladium Books. It originally appeared in RIFTS Sourcebook One from 1991, about a year after the initial release of Archie (the search engine). I don’t know if the writer, Kevin Sembieda, took the name of the AI, A.R.C.H.I.E. Three, from this search engine or if it’s just something he worked up on his own, but I’ve always thought that was kind of funny.
https://palladium-store.com/1001/product/801-Rifts-Sourcebook-One-Revised-and-Expanded.html
The serial port made a really good video about it recently. This channel is pretty amazing for early internet content.
