Archie began as a project for students and volunteer staff at the McGill University School of Computer Science in 1987, when Peter Deutsch (systems manager for the School), Alan Emtage, and Bill Heelan were asked to connect the School to the Internet.
The name derives from the word "archive" without the v. Emtage has said that contrary to popular belief, there was no association with the Archie Comics. Despite this, other early Internet search technologies such as Jughead and Veronica were named after characters from the comics. Anarchie, one of the earliest graphical FTP clients was named for its ability to perform Archie searches.
Archie is a tool for indexing FTP archives, allowing users to more easily identify specific files. It is considered the first Internet search engine. The original implementation was written in 1990 by Alan Emtage, then a postgraduate student at McGill University in Montreal, Canada.
Archie has since been superseded by other, more sophisticated search engines, including Jughead and Veronica. These were in turn superseded by search engines like Yahoo! in 1995 and Google in 1997. Work on Archie ceased in the late 1990s. A legacy Archie server is still maintained active for historic purposes in Poland at University of Warsaw's Interdisciplinary Centre for Mathematical and Computational Modelling.