My initial claim to internet fame is as the author of WsArchie and WsArch32, which were Archie clients. What is an Archie client I hear you ask…
At the start of 1993 I started accessing the internet via Demon. The Internet as we know it today did not exist, in particular the web hadn’t really started and when you did get connected to the internet the resources you had access to were:
- Anonymous FTP servers: These contained tons of free software you could download and use. If you could find it.
- Gopher servers: This was the one of the first search tools which for finding stuff on the internet which amalgamated results from other search engines.
- Archie servers: These catalogued the anonymous ftp servers, so you could either telnet in run a query and get more responses that you could handle or you could use gopher or an archie client.
- Email: You could send email to all your mates, except none of them had email addresses.
And that was about it. Initially much access was via command line clients unless you had access to a X terminal. If you had a PC with Windows 3.1 you were almost certainly connecting to the internet using command line tools.
About this time Trumpet Winsock became available which was the first widely used TCP/IP layer for Windows 3.0. It was a real revolution and suddenly meant there was a relatively user friendly method of connecting windows PCs to the internet via modems.
I had noticed that there was an X-Windows Archie client and thought it was a pretty cool idea so I decided to write one and WsArchie was born.
