Alan Emtage's guest appearances

Alan Emtage

I Share Hope: Chris Williams

Web Masters

Mark Cuban

Amelia Earhart

Dennis Crowley

John Lee Dumas

Jason Calacanis

Kathy Shorr

Mike Davidson

Chris Evans

Mitch Kapor

Peter Rojas

Kevin O'Connor

Jonathan Abrams

David Cummings

Grant Baldwin

Rand Fishkin

OwlTail

In the 1980s, pre-World Wide Web, the Internet was filled with software files hosted on remote machines. However, unlike today, where you can easily find and download pretty much any software you want, that infrastructure didn’t exist in the 1980s. Instead, if you wanted to download a piece of software from the Internet, you had to know it existed and know where and how to access it.To solve this problem for himself, a graduate student at McGill University in Montreal named Alan Emtage built a script to crawl the Internet at night and compile a database of software. He could then search his database to find what he was looking for.When other people saw Alan's database, they wanted access, too. So Alan built a public interface, and that became the first Internet search engine. However, rather than patenting his technology and licensing it -- something that could have made billions of dollars -- Alan made a different choice, and the Internet is a very different place than what it might have been.For a complete transcript of the episode, click here.

In the 1980s, pre-World Wide Web, the Internet was filled with software files hosted on remote machines. However, unlike today, where you can easily find and download pretty much any software you want, that infrastructure didn’t exist in the 1980s. Instead, if you wanted to download a piece of software from the Internet, you had to know it existed and know where and how to access it. To solve this problem for himself, a graduate student at McGill University in Montreal named Alan Emtage built a script to crawl the Internet at night and compile a database of software. He could then search his database to find what he was looking for.When other people saw Alan's database, they wanted access, too. So Alan built a public interface, and that became the first Internet search engine. However, rather than patenting his technology and licensing it -- something that could have made billions of dollars -- Alan made a different choice, and the Internet is a very different place than what it might have been.For a complete transcript of the episode, <a href="https://latonas.com/blog/web-masters-episode-21-alan-emtage/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">click here</a>.

Alan Emtage @ Archie: The Pack Rat Who Invented Internet Search

Alan Emtage oversees programming and content management at Mediapolis. Before joining the company Emtage co-founded Bunyip Information Systems, Inc., where he created the Archie system, the Internet's first search engine. Alan has chaired the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) working groups on Internet Anonymous FTP Archives (IAFA) and Uniform Resource Identifiers (URLs, URNs and URCs), as well as sitting on advisory boards for the National Science Foundation and other agencies. Emtage lectures and speaks at conferences around the world on such topics as Internet information systems and the impact of the Internet on society. He is often called upon by the press for his technological expertise including interviews in the Wall Street Journal and the highly praised PBS series Life on the Internet. Emtage, a native of Barbados, holds Bachelor's and Master's degrees in Computer Science from McGill University.

Alan Emtage oversees programming and content management at Mediapolis. Before joining the company Emtage co-founded Bunyip Information Systems, Inc., where he created the Archie system, the Internet's first search engine. Alan has chaired the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) working groups on Internet Anonymous FTP Archives (IAFA) and Uniform Resource Identifiers (URLs, URNs and URCs), as well as sitting on advisory boards for the National Science Foundation and other agencies. Emtage lectures and speaks at conferences around the world on such topics as Internet information systems and the impact of the Internet on society. He is often called upon by the press for his technological expertise including interviews in the Wall Street Journal and the highly praised PBS series Life on the Internet. Emtage, a native of Barbados, holds Bachelor's and Master's degrees in Computer Science from McGill University.

50: Alan Emtage - Searching for hope with the creator of the first internet search engine - #isharehope