Brewster Lurton Kahle (b.1960) is an American digital librarian, computer engineer, and internet entrepreneur, best known for founding the Internet Archive, a nonprofit dedicated to preserving digital content and providing universal access to knowledge.
Born in New York City, Kahle studied computer science and engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT,) graduating in 1982. He worked at Thinking Machines Corporation, helping develop the Connection Machine, an early parallel supercomputer. In 1989, he created the Wide Area Information Server (WAIS,) one of the first internet-based search and document retrieval systems.
In 1996, Kahle co-founded Alexa Internet, a web traffic analysis company acquired by Amazon (1999.) That same year, he launched the Internet Archive, which has become one of the largest digital libraries, preserving websites, books, audio, and video content. In 2001, he introduced the Wayback Machine, enabling users to access archived websites.
Kahle has authored technical papers and contributed to open-access initiatives. His works include Universal Access to Human Knowledge (2007,) on digital preservation, and The Internet Archive: Building an Internet Library (2012,) detailing the archive’s mission and impact.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Brewster Kahle
If you want to solve hard problems, have hard problems.
—Brewster Kahle
Topics: Problems
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