Archie was developed out of the prospero service, a service to give one a remote directory structure. With this directory service, the archie client looked for the queried filename. A graphical widget for X11 was developed with xarchie. I wanted to add some usefull features like session management, nice GUI and the use of KDE-kfm and got karchie. Please look at the README's for further information. I haven't written the email adresses for archie and xarchie here, because I don't wont to bother them with my bugs.
Programmatic Prospero interface to Archie. The prospero distribution is written by Clifford Neuman and the archie client by Brendan Kehoe