Wide area information server

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Wide Area Information Servers or WAIS was a client-server text searching system that used the ANSI Z39.50 protocol to search index databases on remote computers.

The WAIS protocol and servers were primarily evangelized by Thinking Machines Corporation of Cambridge, Massachusetts. Thinking Machines produced a WAIS server which ran on their CM-1 and CM-5 supercomputers. WAIS clients existed for various operating systems including Windows, Macintosh and UNIX.

With the advent of the World Wide Web in the early 1990s and the bankruptcy of Thinking Machines in 1995, the primitive interface of the WAIS system quickly gave way to Web based search engines. There are few, if any, WAIS servers in existence on the Internet today.

One of the developers of WAIS was Brewster Kahle, who left Thinking Machines to found WAIS Inc in Menlo Park, California with Bruce Gilliat. After selling WAIS to AOL in May 1995 for $15 million, Kahle and Gilliat founded the Internet Archive and then Alexa Internet.

WAIS was often used as a full text search engine for individual Internet Gopher servers, supplementing the popular Veronica system which only searched the menu titles of Gopher sites.

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