‘I wrote a piece of code that gave birth to a multibillion-dollar industry. I didn’t make any money off of it, but I wouldn’t change anything.’

Alan Emtage is the most important man in recent times, having made an immeasurable impact on the Internet culture, or rather, the Internet itself. This Barbados-born Canadian was directly responsible for writing the code for the first search engine. With his good looks, (he is Idris Elba’s first cousin thrice removed, maybe) Emtage is responsible for birthing a multi-billion-dollar industry.

Going to McGill university in Montreal, Canada for his undergraduate and graduate degrees in Computer Science, then a relatively new field of study, he got access to the second Internet connection in Canada.  He was put in charge of finding free software for the faculty and students at the Department of Computer Science, which was where he created the first search engine. As the saying goes,” necessity is the mother of invention”, and it’s certainly true in the case of Archie. Tired of the repetitive task of looking up sites to store in the college archives, he devised a way to store the addresses of the servers he had to visit. He also made the code for the engine open source, which means that Emtage made no money off of his ground-breaking discovery.

This is not Emtage’s only achievement- he was responsible for standardising the URL protocol which is something that we take for granted today. Tim-Berners Lee is often credited with creating the World Wide Web, but it took the effort of the Internet Engineering Task Force (which Emtage co-founded) to implement it. This made the Internet from a small network used primarily by academics, to being inseparable from our lives.

His status as a legend in internet history is undisputed, with the aesthetics and intellect of a Greek God to back it up. Catch him in conversation at the Think Again conclave, at APOGEE 2019.