Brain scan for the Humans

FOR a man who has set himself a seemingly impossible mission. Relaxing in the black leather recliner that serves as his office chair, his stockinged feet wriggling with evident enthusiasm, the founder of the Internet Archive explains what has driven him for more than a decade.

It would be easy to dismiss as an idealistic fruitcake, but for one thing: he has an impressive record when it comes to setting lofty goals and then lining up the people and technology needed to get the job done. “Brewster is a visionary who looks at things differently,” says Carole Moore, chief librarian at the University of Toronto. “He is able to imagine doing things that everyone else thinks are impossible. But then he does them.”

Mr Kahle is an unostentatious millionaire who does not “wear his money on clothes”, as one acquaintance graciously puts it. But behind his dishevelled demeanour is a skilled technologist, an ardent activist and a successful serial entrepreneur. Having founded and sold technology companies to AOL and Amazon, he has now devoted himself to building a non-profit digital archive of free materials—books, films, concerts and so on—to rival the legendary Alexandrian library of antiquity. This has brought him into conflict with Google, the giant internet company which is pursuing a similar goal, but in a rather different (and more commercially oriented) way.

Biblio-tech

After graduating in 1982 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he had studied with Marvin Minsky, an artificial-intelligence guru, Mr Kahle joined a group of MIT alumni who were founding a company, Thinking Machines, that made parallel supercomputers. There Mr Kahle worked alongside such luminaries as Richard Feynman (a Nobel prize-winning American physicist), Dr Minsky and Daniel Hillis, a maverick computer scientist best known as the inventor of the 10,000-year clock.

Building on the search technology developed at Thinking Machines, Mr Kahle left to found his own company, WAIS Inc, in 1989. It took its name from the Wide Area Information Server protocol, an early form of internet search engine which had been developed by Thinking Machines with Apple, Dow Jones and KPMG, and made software for online publishing. Its customers included the Wall Street journal, which was setting up the first subscription-based online news site, and CMP, a magazine company that pioneered internet advertising. Mr Kahle was a decade ahead of his competitors in grasping the importance of payment systems, online privacy and user ratings. AOL bought the firm in 1995 for an undisclosed sum, thought to be around $15m.
In addition to this archive of web pages there is also an audio library with more than 300,000 MP3 files, a moving-images archive with more than 150,000 films and videos, and a live-music archive with recordings of more than 60,000 concerts. All the collections are available free to anyone with internet access, each gathering its own set of fans. A remarkably popular archive within the audio library is devoted to the Grateful Dead.