Brewster Kahle

Notable work and positions

Internet Archive — Founder and Director (1996– )
Alexa Internet — Co-founder (1996; acquired by Amazon, 1999)
WAIS, Inc. — Founder (1992; acquired by America Online, 1995)
Board member — Electronic Frontier Foundation

Biography

Brewster Kahle is an American digital librarian, computer engineer, and internet entrepreneur best known as the founder of the Internet Archive, the nonprofit digital library behind the Wayback Machine. Born in New York City and raised in Scarsdale, New York, Kahle graduated from MIT in 1982 with a degree in computer science and engineering, studying artificial intelligence under Marvin Minsky and Danny Hillis. He helped start the supercomputer company Thinking Machines before founding WAIS, Inc. in 1992, creator of the Wide Area Information Server, one of the internet's earliest publishing and distributed search systems; WAIS was acquired by America Online in 1995. Kahle used proceeds from that sale to found Alexa Internet in San Francisco in 1996 alongside Bruce Gilliat, building web-traffic analytics and archiving tools that were later acquired by Amazon.com in 1999. In parallel, Kahle founded the nonprofit Internet Archive in 1996 with the stated mission of universal access to all knowledge, beginning with systematic crawls of the public web and later expanding into e-books, audio, video, and software preservation; the Archive has since grown to over a trillion archived web pages. Kahle donated an early copy of the web archive to the Library of Congress in 1998 and has served on the board of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. He was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame in 2012 and elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. The Internet Archive has been involved in ongoing litigation with major publishers over its digital book-lending practices.