Barbadian Alan Emtage born November is a computer scientist who conceived and implemented the first version of Archie, a pre-Web Internet search engine for locating material in public FTP archives. It is widely considered the world’s first Internet search engine. Emtage was born in Barbados and attended high school at Harrison College from 1975 to 1983 where he graduated at the top of his class, winning the Barbados Scholarship.
In 1983 Emtage entered McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, studying for an honors Bachelor’s degree in computer science which was followed by a Master’s degree in 1987 from which he graduated in 1991. Emtage was part of the team that brought the first Internet link to eastern Canada (and only the second link in the country) in 1986. In 1989 while a student and working as a systems administrator for the School of Computer Science, Emtage conceived and implemented the original version of the Archie search engine, the world’s first Internet search engine.
