Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle graduated from MIT in 1982 with a degree in Computer Science and Engineering, where he focused his studies largely on the field of Artificial Intelligence. After graduation, Kahle joined with several of his Artificial Intelligence-studying peers from MIT to create Thinking Machines, Inc. The company specialized in building supercomputers using massively parallel processing. While working at Thinking Machines, Kahle, realizing the excellent searching capability of the these supercomputers, which led to his created the WAIS project in 1988. WAIS was able to search the contents of computers and databases on the then-primitive internet for efficient retrieval. When Kahle sold the company to AOL in 1995, he embarked on two new projects at the same time: Alexa Internet and the Internet Archive. Alexa Internet, a browser toolbar which make user’s online searching for efficient – donated copies or “snapshots” of websites it took during its webcrawls to the Internet Archive project.
The archive compiles all of these snapshots of the internet to create a library of websites, allowing users to view archived versions of sites as they appeared in the past. The project, which now re-takes its snapshot of every website on the internet every two months, contains more info than 15,000 copies of Encyclopedia Britannica.
Now funded not only by Kahle and his Alexa Internet company but also Library of Congress and Compaq among others, the archive is recognized as an official library by the state of California.
While the Internet Archive may seem like little more than a trip down e-memory lane, it’s sociological implications may be more than you would assume. With the extremely fast turnover of information on the internet, a great deal of information would be completely were it not for the Internet Archive. It serves as a valuable historical resource and digital memory of sorts – preserving our past in the digital age the way traditional libraries would in the pre-internet era. With the internet now as the main source of information dissemination and business, its vastly important that we have an archive to learn from our own past.
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