Brewster Kahle

Brewster Kahle, Digital Librarian and Founder of the Internet Archive, has been working to provide universal access to all knowledge for more than 25 years.

Kahle's stated goal is "Universal access to all knowledge," and his catalog of inventions and institutions created for this purpose read like a Web's Greatest Hits list. Since the 1980s, Kahle has focused on developing technologies for information discovery and digital libraries. In 1982 he helped start Thinking Machines, a supercomputer company specializing in text searching and would go on to invent the Internet's first publishing and distributed search system, WAIS (Wide Area Information Server), whose customers included the New York Times and the United States Senate.

In 1996, Kahle founded the Internet Archive which may be the largest digital library. At the same time, he co-founded Alexa Internet which helps catalog the Web in April 1996, which was sold to Amazon.com in 1999. In 2012, Kahle and banking veteran Jordan Modell created the Internet Archive Federal Credit Union.

Kahle earned a B.S. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1982. As a student, he studied artificial intelligence with W. Daniel Hillis and Marvin Minsky. He serves on the boards of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Public Knowledge, the European Archive, the Television Archive and the Internet Archive.

Kahle and his wife, Mary Austin, run the Kahle/Austin Foundation. The Foundation supports the Free Software Foundation for its GNU project, among other projects