by Benny Evangelista, San Francisco Chronicle
Brewster Kahle was a 19-year-old computer science student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology when a friend posed a simple, yet life-changing question: “What can you do with your life that is worthwhile?” Kahle is still happily pursuing his second big idea – to create the digital-age version of the Great Library of Alexandria. His Internet Archive – fittingly based in an old Richmond District church that architecturally harks back to the ancient Egyptian library – is building a rich repository of modern digital culture. It’s best known for the online Wayback Machine, which provides a searchable online museum of the Internet, archiving more than 150 billion Web pages that have appeared since 1996. The nonprofit archive stretches beyond the Internet. It has recorded 350,000 television news broadcasts, including reports from around the world during the week of the 2001 terrorist attacks, and stores 200,000 digitized books.
http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Brewster-Kahle-s-Internet-Archive-3946898.php
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