For pioneering roles in online search engines, and in digital preservation and open access to knowledge provided by the Internet Archive
Brewster Kahle is a visionary computer engineer and “digital librarian” whose career is defined by a singular mission: providing universal access to all knowledge. Educated at MIT under AI pioneers Marvin Minsky and Danny Hillis, Kahle began his career at Thinking Machines Corporation (1983–1989), where he served as lead engineer for the Connection Machine.
The Connection Machine was a massively parallel supercomputer designed to process huge datasets, effectively serving as a hardware prototype for a “library of everything.” Kahle later called the Connection Machine, “the world’s first search engine.” Realizing that hardware needed a distribution mechanism, Kahle invented WAIS (Wide Area Information Servers) in 1989 and sold it to AOL in 1995. WAIS was the internet’s first distributed publishing and search system, allowing users to find documents across different servers, a direct precursor to the World Wide Web.
In 1996, Kahle cofounded Alexa Internet, a web analytics service acquired by Amazon in 1999. Simultaneously, he founded the Internet Archive, a nonprofit online library best known for the Wayback Machine, which recently archived its one trillionth webpage. Kahle’s work has built the infrastructure that allows for a permanent historical record of the digital age.
