Brewster Kahle

says his education at MIT instilled in him a desire to "make things that made an impact on large numbers of people." From his work with Danny Hillis, building supercomputers at Thinking Machines to his WAIS project, which categorized content on the Internet years before Yahoo!, Kahle has worked on projects that sought to alleviate someone's information pain.

His latest effort, Alexa Internet, tries to make the Internet more navigable by offering metadata on websites through a plug-in that lives onscreen with the browser. The project is closely tied to his Alexa archive, which has recorded much of the Internet on several terabytes of data, housed somewhere in San Francisco's Presidio.

Kahle talked to David Sims about how one archives the Internet, and what value that might have. (Recorded July 16, 1997.)

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Job
Internet Archivist, Entrepreneur

Home
Lives in one of 30 officers' homes, now part of Presidio National Park, in San Francisco.

Education
B.S. in Computer Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1982

Most Recent Accomplishment
Archived the Web on 2 terabytes of storage; devised system to navigate Web following the trails of where others have gone.

Track Record
Built Connection Machines at Thinking Machines until 1992. Founded WAIS Inc. in 1992. Sold WAIS to America OnLine in 1995 for $15 million. In 1996 left WAIS to form Alexa Internet and the Internet Archive.

Personal
Married, two sons. Optimistic Statement About The Internet
"I think the technology we are building is really trying to interconnect people better. If people communicate better and faster, you can make the whole organism smarter. That's what we're shooting for."

Pessimistic Statement About The Internet
"It takes longer than you can possibly imagine."