Alan Emtage

Alan Emtage grew up in Barbados and got his first computer, a Sinclair ZX81 with a single kilobyte of memory, in 1981. He finished top of his class at Harrison College and won the island\'s national scholarship, which took him to McGill University in Montreal in 1983. He helped bring the first internet connection to eastern Canada in 1986, and as a postgraduate he earned money as a systems administrator for the computer science department.

Part of that job was finding free software for staff and students. Files sat on hundreds of anonymous FTP servers around the world, and the only way to find one was to log into each server and look. Emtage wrote scripts that visited the servers overnight and built a list of everything on them. When people started asking him to search his list, he and a colleague, Peter Deutsch, turned it into a service anyone could query. They called it Archie, short for archive. It went online in 1990, before the web existed, and at its height handled roughly half the traffic in and out of Montreal.

Emtage did not patent it. He has said he does not regret this. He helped set up the Internet Society, chaired working groups at the body that writes internet standards, and co-chaired the group that defined the URL. He was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame in 2017.