Buce Marjorie C

BSIM – OOA

SYSANAL

Case study 20

Brewster Kahle

Founder, WAIS, Internet Archive,

Alexa Internet

Brewster Kahle started WAIS (Wide Area Information servers) in the late 80’s while n employee of thinking machines. Thinking machines was set in a 1800s Victorian mansion on 100 acres of forest outside of Boston. It had the great fortune of starting with $8 million in the bank.  He left it 1993 and founded WAIS, Inc. It is one of the earliest forms of Internet search software. The idea of WAIS was to make network services. Kahle tried out the idea of remote publishing. It was the first publishing system.

One of the interesting ideas about WAIS was its use of freeware and shareware. It was a WAIS browser and a server, so people could go and build their own system. It was the first company to think of a internet as a distribution system of software to give something away and sell it.

Developed before the web, it was in someway a predecessor to web search engines. Kahle sold WAIS to AOL in 1995. Then he built two organizations at the same time. One was called Alexa Internet short for the library of Alexandria and the other one was the Internet Archive , to achieve everything that as in the library. Alexa was a for- profit, and internet archive was non profit.

The Alexa tool bar tracked user browsing behavior and suggested related links using collaborative filtering.  One captured, pages visited by users would then be donated to the related non profit Internet archive, to help build a history of the web.

Alexa was acquired by Amazon in 1994. Kahle continue to run the internet archieve.

Things that I learn:

From this start up I learned how hard it is to run a company because it is on your own hand to handle everything. In this startup I learned that you need to do your best in order to achieve what you want.