Bajan inventor Alan Emtage gets highest McGill University Honour Loop Barbados

Black Immigrant Daily News

Alan Emtage now holds the honour Doctor of Science, honoris causa (D.Sc.) conferred upon by McGill University.

He attended McGill in 1983 as an undergraduate scholarship student and left the university eight years later with two degrees and “at the same established himself as one of the pioneers of the Internet.”

Presenting the highest honour which could be bestowed upon someone by McGill was Chancellor Emeritus The Honourable Michael A. Meighen, C.M., Q.C., LL.D.

Reading the citation, Professor Bruce Lennox, Dean of the Faculty of Science, McGill, said that it was Emtage who found a way to browse and access the millions of files that were now quickly being uploaded onto the Internet but for all intents and purposes, not easily accessible.

“Mr Emtage came up with the idea in 1989 to index the Internet and created a programme he called Archie. Archie is recognised as the world’s very first search engine.

“With Archie, what once took hours and hours of manual searching, could now be achieved in seconds. After completion of his MSc, Mr Emtage and his colleague Peter Deutsch cofounded the company Bunyip Information Systems, Inc. This was the first company in the world dedicated to information services on the Internet. He went on to play a leading role in web technologies.”

He chaired several working groups in the Internet Engineering Task Force including co-chairing the uniformed resource identifier working group which created the standard that is very familiar to all of you – the uniformed resource locators or more commonly known as URLs. This is the standard by which websites are accessed to this very day.”

With his company, Mediapolis, he showed the need for the advancement of social good while using the Internet as a tool, and made sure that is an inclusive platform.

In 2017, he became the first person from the Caribbean to be inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame – a most prestigious lifetime achievement award.

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