Updated April 24, 2026 at 11:05 AM CDT
Part 2 of the TED Radio Hour episode For All Eternity.
The internet is forever ... or is it? The average webpage is deleted or changed in just 100 days. To preserve all human knowledge — digital and analog — Brewster Kahle created the Internet Archive.
About Brewster Kahle
Brewster Kahle is an American digital librarian, computer engineer, inventor, and philanthropist, whose stated goal is "Universal access to all knowledge." In 1982 he helped start Thinking Machines, a supercomputer company specializing in text searching, and would go on to invent the internet's first publishing and distributed search system, WAIS, whose customers included the New York Times and the United States Senate.
Kahle is the founder and director of the Internet Archive, a free service that archives World Wide Web documents. In 2001, he implemented the Wayback Machine, which allows public access to the World Wide Web archive that the Internet Archive has been gathering since 1996. He holds a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science and Engineering from MIT.
This segment of the TED Radio Hour was produced by James Delahoussaye and edited by Sanaz Meshkinpour and Manoush Zomorodi. You can follow us on Facebook @TEDRadioHour and email us at TEDRadioHour@npr.org.
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