Alan on the slopes of Krakatoa
Alan Emtage Unsung Tech Hero By Sarah Venable
He invented a tool that the modern world can’t live without In the infancy of computing, before the internet allowed us instant access to untold volumes of information, finding archived facts took hours. There must be a better way, thought a young computer science student at McGill in the late 1980s. What if I could automate the process? He wrote some code to do this and called it Archie—Archive without the V. Thus was born the first search engine, predecessor to Google. The young man was Alan Emtage. A natural polymath, he was born here in 1964 to a distinguished Barbadian family that encouraged curiosity and investigation. When he won a Barbados Scholarship, he chose the
relatively new field of computing, and the rest is history for which he gets scant credit. Alan is now Chief Technology Officer at Mediapolis in New York City, but spends most of his time gaily globe-trotting between his property in Barbados, his cottage in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and far flung destinations in pursuit of peak experiences. (He’s a regular at the creatively extreme Burning Man Festival). He keeps followers posted on Facebook, and enjoys provoking debate on issues like civil liberties and intellectual property. “I’ve always been searching for something,” he said. “Go, Baje!” say we.
meet a Bajan Adventure & Discovery 213