The Wayback Machine + Internet Archive with Brewster Kahle - Founder and Chief Librarian

**Ray Rike** (0:00)
Hello, I'm Ray Wright, founder and CEO of RevOpSquared, and host of the Metrics that Measure Up podcast. We talked to a wide variety of B2B SaaS industry thought leaders, executives, and people just like you to discuss what metrics, KPIs, and benchmarks they use to enable better data-driven metrics-informed decisions that accelerate revenue performance and increase enterprise value. Now, on to today's show. Welcome to today's episode of the Metrics It Measure Up podcast. Today, we are joined by Brewster Kahle, the founder and digital librarian at the Internet Archive, home of The Wayback Machine, and an inductee into the Internet Hall of Fame. Today, we will be covering three main topics. One, the inspiration to launch the Internet Archive, the world's largest digital library. Two, the story behind The Wayback Machine. And three, the magnitude of the efforts to support the vision of the Internet Archive. Brewster, please take a moment to give a brief background of your journey to becoming a guest on the Metrics that Measure Up podcast.

**Brewster Kahle** (1:18)
Ray, thank you very much for inviting me on this.
This is just completely fun. And this is for people that are listening. Ray is this inspiring fellow in the Bay Area and happens to be my neighbor. And so we've gotten to know each other basically personally and sort of sharing sort of our general approaches towards how to make a big difference. And so, Ray, thank you very much for this opportunity. For me, I'm a geek. I started out with sort of a technical background. And the idea was to try to figure out a way that you could use that to do good, right? To do something you'd be proud of, something that would last a long time for others, but also be a long term trajectory. So I thought, okay, can we just build that library of Alexandria version 2? Can we make the Internet, which didn't exist yet, into that vision of access to information? That seemed like something we could do with our computers that had been promised for a long time, even by 1980 And so by 1980s, okay, let's go and do this. So I went and worked with Marvin Minsky at the Artificial Intelligence Lab at MIT with Danny Hillis specifically to go and try to figure out how you can make all of this go. The connection machine, which is a supercomputer, was the only thing that could be big enough to be able to store, well, all of human knowledge. And just to give you an idea, that original connection machine was 32 megabytes of RAM. And we built the first RAID system disk drive that was 5 gigabytes, and that was enormous at that time. So that was a stepping stone towards getting things to work for getting information online, making it searchable easily and going. So I had to learn chips, how to make boards, operating system for a parallel computer, that kind of thing, to try to get that to launch. Then I found that really we needed a mechanism of getting it distributed, and the telco systems were just not making it. And, you know, this was the time in the early 80s. You know, you had Apple Talk for trying to communicate between your punky little floppy drive driven PC or Macintosh to try to get it to your printer. I mean, it's just like, no, this is not going to work. And the ARPANET was coming around. And that seemed like just the right infrastructure. But it was coming out of the Defense Department. So trying to get that over the line into general use, I could go and build an application on it. And it built Waze, Wider Information Servers, or Claim to Fame. Maybe the reason why I'm in the Internet Hall of Fame is I did the first information system publishing system on the Internet before the World Wide Web, called Waze, Wider Information Servers. And when Tim's system was really getting popular, then it moved the search part, which is Waze, into itself. And so we're all using the web, which is just tremendous. Anyway, steps along the way, I started a company called Waze Incorporated, sold it to America Online to try to get publishers to take the Internet seriously. And then went to build the Alexa Internet, which was sold to amazon.com and the Internet Archive, a non-profit library for the Internet. Anyway, so that's sort of the brief, the idea is to try to think big, right? That was the thing that Marvin Minsky and Danny Hillis says, think big, go for your dream. And even if you're not going to be the one that achieves it in your lifetime, I think achieving your dream is overrated. What you want is a direction. And so the idea of universal access to all knowledge, that was the direction that I have been pursuing for 40 years now. And I noticed a little chagrin that we're not any further than we are now.