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Brewster Kahle '82

Wayback Machine Seeks to Capture the Internet for All

(First published in Technology Review, August 2005)

Brewster Kahle '82

"I wanted to tackle a project that was really big," Brewster Kahle '82 says. Choosing universal access to all human knowledge qualifies. And co-founding the Internet Archive (IA), the largest publicly accessible, privately-funded digital archive in the world (www.archive.org) in 1996 is a good start.

"Our work of 'backing up the Internet' is encompassing. We go after everything," says Kahle, digital librarian and IA director. "Our technology can cost-effectively store every book, movie, sound recording, software package, and public Web page ever created, and allow free access to these collections by anyone in the world."

Located on the Presidio in San Francisco, the Internet Archive's massive database - the Wayback Machine -- now contains over one petabyte of information (equal to 1,024 terabytes or more text than in the Library of Congress). The monthly increase of information amounts to 20 terabytes, equaling the text in a shelf of books 600 miles long. And Kahle wants more because every year information vanishes. "If it isn't on the net, these days it's as if it doesn't exist," Kahle observes.

As an MIT student, Kahle wanted to create a technology that helps. That led Kahle to the Artificial Intelligence Lab. "Marvin Minsky and Danny Hillis taught me two ideas: 'Think Big', and 'What will serve the greatest good?' The two biggest ideas being kicked around then were encryption and digital libraries." So Kahle took on both.

In 1983, Kahle helped launch Thinking Machines, a parallel supercomputer maker, where he was lead engineer for six years. In 1989, he invented the Internet's first publishing system, WAIS (Wide Area Information Server) enabling huge quantities of information to be indexed, ranked, and searchable across the Internet. WAIS Inc. was sold to America Online in 1995. A year later, he co-founded both the Internet Archive and Alexa Internet, which was sold to Amazon.com in 1999 and is now bundled into more than 80 percent of web browsers.

"The opportunity of the Internet is sharing our passions and knowledge whether it's science, Texas history, or your garage band's music video," Kahle says. "If you have gathered, produced, or created content, the Internet Archive will store it for you - for free and forever - and let you share it with the world."