Brewster Kahle

Brewster Kahle is the visionary digital archivist, engineer and entrepreneur who founded the non-profit Internet Archive in 1996 and co-founded the commercial web-crawl company Alexa Internet the same year. Under Kahle’s leadership, Internet Archive launched the iconic Wayback Machine in 2001, enabling the public to browse archived versions of websites and preserving vast tracts of the web for posterity.

He studied computer science and engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (BS, 1982) and cut his teeth as lead engineer at Thinking Machines Corporation where he helped develop WAIS, one of the first distributed search/document-retrieval systems.

Kahle’s abiding mission is to enable “Universal Access to All Knowledge,” and his leadership at Internet Archive has rallied a global movement around open access, digital preservation and free culture. He was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame in 2012.

Today, Brewster continues to shape how we remember and reuse digital heritage—ensuring that websites, books, audio, video and software are preserved and freely accessible for this generation and the next.