Brewster Kahle, founder and librarian of the Internet Archive, has practical experience behind his universalist vision of access to every bit of knowledge ever created, for all time.
Bio
Stewart Brand
Stewart Brand is co-founder and president of The Long Now Foundation and co-founder of Global Business Network. He created and edited the Whole Earth Catalog (National Book Award), and co-founded the Hackers Conference and The WELL. His books include The Clock of the Long Now; How Buildings Learn; and The Media Lab. His most recent book, titled Whole Earth Discipline, is published by Viking in the US and Atlantic in the UK.
Brewster Kahle
Brewster Kahle, a computer engineer, internet entrepreneur, and digital librarian, founded the Internet Archive in 1996. He is focused on providing universal access to all knowledge, and developing technologies for information discovery and digital libraries. He was co-founder of Alexa Internet, which helped catalog the Web, which was later sold to Amazon.com.
In 1989, Kahle invented the Internet's first publishing system, WAIS (Wide Area Information Server) system and in 1989, founded WAIS Inc., a pioneering electronic publishing company, and was later acquired by America Online. Kahle, a board member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, is a key supporter of the Open Content Alliance.
Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive, discusses the organization's mission to digitize all the world's books. He explains that in addition to making books available online, they've also built "bookmobiles" to provide printed copies to impoverished communities.
Founder Brewster Kahle discusses the inner workings of the Internet Archive's most famous service, the Wayback Machine. He explains that in addition to providing users a dose of nostalgia, it can also be used to prevent people from rewriting history.
Founder Brewster Kahle discusses the next step for the Internet Archive, which involves making its information accessible to a new type of consumer: computers. He explains that in addition to helping improve artificial intelligence, it's also important to provide information in a format that children will want to consume.
Publicly accessible computer network connecting many smaller networks from around the world. It grew out of a U.S. Defense Department program called ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network), established in 1969 with connections between computers at the University of California at Los Angeles, Stanford Research Institute, the University of California-Santa Barbara, and the University of Utah. ARPANET's purpose was to conduct research into computer networking in order to provide a secure and survivable communications system in case of war. As the network quickly expanded, academics and researchers in other fields began to use it as well. In 1971 the first program for sending e-mail over a distributed network was developed; by 1973, the year international connections to ARPANET were made (from Britain and Norway), e-mail represented most of the traffic on ARPANET. The 1970s also saw the development of mailing lists, newsgroups and bulletin-board systems, and the TCP/IP communications protocols, which were adopted as standard protocols for ARPANET in 198283, leading to the widespread use of the term Internet. In 1984 the domain name addressing system was introduced. In 1986 the National Science Foundation established the NSFNET, a distributed network of networks capable of handling far greater traffic, and within a year more than 10,000 hosts were connected to the Internet. In 1988 real-time conversation over the network became possible with the development of Internet Relay Chat protocols (seechat). In 1990 ARPANET ceased to exist, leaving behind the NSFNET, and the first commercial dial-up access to the Internet became available. In 1991 the World Wide Web was released to the public (via FTP). The Mosaic browser was released in 1993, and its popularity led to the proliferation of World Wide Web sites and users. In 1995 the NSFNET reverted to the role of a research network, leaving Internet traffic to be routed through network providers rather than NSF supercomputers. That year the Web became the most popular part of the Internet, surpassing the FTP protocols in traffic volume. By 1997 there were more than 10 million hosts on the Internet and more than 1 million registered domain names. Internet access can now be gained via radio signals, cable-television lines, satellites, and fibre-optic connections, though most traffic still uses a part of the public telecommunications (telephone) network. The Internet is widely regarded as a development of vast significance that will affect nearly every aspect of human culture and commerce in ways still only dimly discernible.