A many years ago, the IF Archive existed, and it was an FTP site. It lived at ftp.gmd.de
. That was a long time ago. (1992, but who's counting.)
Slightly less long ago, the World Wide Web existed, and I said "I bet there could be a web mirror of the FTP site." So I (along with my co-conspirator Paul) built that as a holiday break project. It was just a static mirror of the files, with HTML index pages. I announced it on the rec.arts.int-fiction
newsgroup.
A few days later, someone posted "How Do You Find Anything?"
Fair question. The favored answer was "Download the Master-Index
text file and search through that." Nobody even mentioned the idea of a web search engine.
It wasn't a very complicated archive at that point, though. If you were looking for a game, you went to games/zcode
or games/tads
or whatever and all the games were listed. Hierarchical folders; you probably knew where you were going.
More files and more folders were added over the years, but people still mostly knew their way around. Then Google turned up and that helped a lot. And then in 2007, Mike Roberts launched IFDB, which was an extremely searchable database of IF games -- with links to the IF Archive. So that solved the problem completely!
Mostly. Ish.
IFDB is very comprehensive for games, but it doesn't try to cover interpreters, zines, articles, or the rest of the eclectic material which the Archive has collected over the decades. Google is still okay for this purpose (with the "search web" option and site:ifarchive.org
). But the idea of a locally hosted search tool kept coming up.
Last weekend I finally said, "Eh, how hard could this be?" Answer: not hard at all! I had a first draft working in about two days. Don't I feel silly now?
Behold: the IF Archive search page.