Ever Wonder The Origin Of Amazon's Alexa? -- April 13, 2020

Connecting the dots.

Link to link to link.

We start here.

The very short article at that link, provides a link to this longer story.

Now it gets interesting.

Click on ""libertymavenstock" at that previous linked article. That takes us to "Internet Archive WayBack Machine" which seems to be a broken URL.

But click on "Internet Archive" at the menu at the top. The URL is web.archive.org. Interesting, huh?

But it seems we are not getting anywhere. Click on "Internet Archive WayBackMachine" again.

This time, a new menu shows up across the top:
About .... Contact .. Blog .... Projects ... Help ... Donate ... Jobs .. Volunteer ... People

Click on "People."

This is a most interesting page.

The following bios:

• executive staff: eleven people; all whites; four women; seven men
• board of directors: four people
• Brewster Kahle, Board Chair, Founder & Digital Librarian, Internet Archive
• Rick Prelinger, Board President
• Kathleen Burch, decades of experience, incuding "community activation; passion: publishing
• David Rumsey: digital mapping
• Digital Libraries Division: ten people, again, all white; four women, six men;
• Engineering and Petabox: sixteen people; other than one Asian, all white; two women, the rest men;
• the list continues; similar bios 

Bottom line: a group of very, very wealth white males (for the most part) who are focused on archiving the web. 

Now let's go back to the founder and digital librarian, the guy at the top: Brewster Kahle:

A passionate advocate for public Internet access and a successful entrepreneur, Brewster Kahle has spent his career intent on a singular focus: providing Universal Access to All Knowledge. He is the founder and Digital Librarian of the Internet Archive, one of the largest libraries in the world.

Soon after graduating from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he studied artificial intelligence, Kahle helped found the company Thinking Machines, a parallel supercomputer maker.

In 1989, Kahle created the Internet's first publishing system called Wide Area Information Server (WAIS), later selling the company to AOL.

In 1996, Kahle co-founded Alexa Internet, which helps catalog the Web, selling it to Amazon.com in 1999.

The Internet Archive, which he founded in 1996, now preserves 20 petabytes of data - the books, Web pages, music, television, and software of our cultural heritage, working with more than 400 library and university partners to create a digital library, accessible to all.

 Remember Google's plan to scan every book ever published. At "Internet Archive, Open Library":

OpenLibrary.org is comprised of two great parts! A free, digital lending library of over 2 million eBooks that can be read in a browser or downloaded for reading off-line. And, a unique project to build one web page for every book ever published. Over 20 million books already have a page on OpenLibrary.org

I was curious. Would they have it? Sophia wanted to me to read "White Fang" by Jack London to her.

At  "Internet Archive, Open Library" I searched "White Fang." OMG! It popped up.

To access the book, I had to register, sign up, but so far it's free.

Registering was very simple.

OMG! It really works.

We found White Fangs within a couple of clicks. It downloads immediately and it works beyond expectations. I am blown away by this.