A Memory Palace for Software
San Francisco’s Internet Archive.
Arena Magazine <[email protected]>
Share
Arena Magazine promotes its article "A Memory Palace for Software" by Zaitoon Zafar, which tells the story of San Francisco's Internet Archive and its founder Brewster Kahle. The article highlights Kahle's plan to preserve the Internet and his background in artificial intelligence. It is featured in Issue 009: Hello, World, the magazine's ode to software.
What the raw message shows
From the headers
- Sent with
-
Klaviyo See it in the headers
Across Arena Magazine's email
- Sends
- About 3 a week
- DMARC
-
Not enforced
Failures are monitored but still delivered.
The copy
571 words · about 2 min to read
Telling the Great American Story, in Print!
A Memory Palace for Software
San Francisco’s Internet Archive, by Zaitoon Zafar. This article was first published in Issue 009: Hello, World, our ode to software.
In a 1996 essay for Scientific American, Brewster Kahle laid out his plan for preserving the Internet. He noted, “Where we can read the 400-year old books printed by Gutenberg, it is often difficult to read a 15 year-old computer disk.” At the time of his writing, web pages had an average lifespan of just 75 days — most sites lived on temporary personal accounts, university servers, small ISP hosting, or short-lived commercial setups — and storage hardware was “rare and specialized because of costs.” A webpage could vanish the moment a server shut down, or if a file format became obsolete — a single company’s collapse meant a webpage could be lost forever. The Internet was very quickly becoming a record of human knowledge and culture, yet there was no guarantee that this ever-increasing record would survive.
That same year, Brewster Kahle went on to found the Internet Archive, his Library of Alexandria for the digital age. Kahle, a computer science and engineering graduate, had spent his time at MIT immersed in the then nascent field of Artificial Intelligence. He graduated in 1981 and, only two years later, helped Daniel Hillis start the Thinking Machines Company (TMC) in 1983.
TMC was one of the first companies created solely for the purpose of creating artificial intelligence. Hillis’ idea was parallelism: rather than using one fast processor, computer scientists would be better off using thousands of simple processors working in parallel. This contrarian enterprise attracted the likes of Richard Feynman, Marvin Minsky and Stephen Wolfram, but its approach to AI never delivered. TMC filed for bankruptcy in 1994. Still, they showed that parallelism could work at mass scale, effectively laying the groundwork for GPUs and the subsequent AI revolution. During this time at TMC, Kahle also helped invent WAIS (Wide Area Information Server) in 1989 — one of the Internet’s earliest search and document retrieval systems, and a precursor to the modern web search.
After leaving TMC in 1989, Kahle founded WAIS Inc. with Bruce Gilliat to bring the search and document retrieval technology to market. The firm sold Internet publishing tools and services to clients like Encyclopaedia Britannica and The New York Times, helping bring their massive databases of billions of words to the Internet. WAIS Inc. was purchased by America Online in 1995 for $15 million.
In the book Founders at Work: Stories of Startups’ Early Days, Kahle reminisces, “My first startup upon leaving Thinking Machines was a bootstrap. We had no investment at all, and I had no savings, so it was self-funded from the beginning…It was sort of like going from the Roaring ‘20s, when champagne is coming from everywhere, into the depression, where you are washing your baggies and reusing twist ties.”
Kahle was driven by what he foresaw: the early Internet carried with it a looming risk of massive cultural loss, akin to the burning of the Library of Alexandria, the loss of early films (recycled for silver), and discarded early printed works. To keep it all from disappearing, he cofounded two organizations: Alexa Internet, and, again with Gilliat, the non-profit Internet Archive. Alexa crawled the web to provide traffic-based recommendations and was acquired by Amazon in 1999 for $250 million in stock.
The words as text: what a screen reader can follow, and all there is when images don't load.
What the headers say
Read from the message's own headers, as it arrived.
- Came from
-
kl-203-20-2.kmta.shared.klaviyomail.com
· 170.203.20.2
Klaviyo's sending servers
- SPF
- Pass for k3.send.arenamag.com
- DKIM
-
- Pass signed by shared.klaviyomail.com
- Pass signed by send.arenamag.com
- DMARC
-
Pass for arenamag.com
Policy: none, so failures would still be delivered
- Unsubscribe
-
One-click
Meets the Gmail and Yahoo rule for bulk senders.
- Complaints
-
Feedback loop set up
Mailbox providers can report spam complaints straight back to the sender.
Show all 21 headers Hide the headers
As received, minus the delivery side: the archive's own addresses show as [recipient], its mail servers as [receiver], signatures are left out and unsubscribe links trimmed to their host.
Route
- Received Identifies Klaviyo
- from kl-203-20-2.kmta.shared.klaviyomail.com (170.203.20.2) by [receiver] (cloudflare) id GBxwtChpGqrl for <[recipient]>; Thu, 22 Oct 2026 12:00:57 +0000
- Received Identifies Klaviyo
- from unknown (HELO kmta-worker-prod-go-8b48d889d-7lc7p) ([email protected]@10.5.127.18) by kmta-mta-blue-0f82c131fec90392a.servers.clovesoftware.com with SMTP; 22 Oct 2026 12:00:57 -0000
Authentication
- Received-SPF Authentication result
- pass ([receiver]: domain of bounce-kl_28279663254-kl_101101m5azx1h36xc4dg-h-346e1a6baa=2@k3.send.arenamag.com designates 170.203.20.2 as permitted sender) receiver=[receiver]; client-ip=170.203.20.2; envelope-from="bounce-kl_28279663254-kl_101101m5azx1h36xc4dg-h-346e1a6baa=2@k3.send.arenamag.com"; helo=kl-203-20-2.kmta.shared.klaviyomail.com;
- Authentication-Results Authentication result
- [receiver]; dkim=pass header.d=shared.klaviyomail.com header.s=def1 header.b=hYcq4Ia7; dkim=pass header.d=send.arenamag.com header.s=mtd1 header.b=bAeHH+rO; dmarc=pass header.from=arenamag.com policy.dmarc=none; spf=none ([receiver]: no SPF records found for [email protected]) smtp.helo=kl-203-20-2.kmta.shared.klaviyomail.com; spf=pass ([receiver]: domain of bounce-kl_28279663254-kl_101101m5azx1h36xc4dg-h-346e1a6baa=2@k3.send.arenamag.com designates 170.203.20.2 as permitted sender) smtp.mailfrom=bounce-kl_28279663254-kl_101101m5azx1h36xc4dg-h-346e1a6baa=2@k3.send.arenamag.com; arc=none smtp.remote-ip=170.203.20.2
Platform
- X-Mailer-Info-Extra2
- 9da69b7ff0:0wZkRzY4ZzMoFDe6FWNtFDMxEDMx8FbrBwcAc mcv5SZ2lGajJXY49mYulGQh5WZyFGAyBgMucTMuQjLwEDAw9GAy0CMy0yMwITLstGAu9G AzIjMAk2bA02bj5CbpFWbvlXa2FGbr5CZlJXYoNnLhRXbr5iMtAjMtMDMy0CbrBAavBAN fh2ZphGAu1GA4QDOAkWbA02bj5yZh1WYuVmch5CZuV2cuMzaAJTPhFmY2EWMlZDNz0Cat cGZ0MGe2MDaxgnehVTbxATMxATMfx2atQTNyMjN2kzNygjMfx2atU2YuV3biBgZtBANfh 2ZphGAtBAN1IzM2YTO3IDOy8FbrBAbAcER0MEW2MDSxglWBVTTxATMxATMAkGA91nIsFW duFWbiojI4JCLiYDVTRFRzQVQEVEUSlDWXNTMK1kVQhUNNFDMiojItRnIsQTN0AzN2ITO 3EjOiQnIsICSSdDW2oUQaBzSHRENDhlNzgUMYpVQ10UMwIiOi0mIsYTN0AzN2ITO3EjOi QHaiwSM6ISbhNmIsIyRMZmetZlI6IyYisnOiYDVTRFRzQVQEVEUSlDWXNTMK1kVQhUNNF DMisHIAMGA2QjMyITYycjZmFTN++
- X-Mailer-Info
- 10.sGbfJDOycTO2YzMyUDN.sGbfFDMxEDMx0WNhpHexg2M2g3Y0Q2Z.QYyVmbh BUauJ2b4FmcjhWa2VmLvJ3Z.gsnIwETT1gEUW1kSxMzVYljUQVERBR1MER1UUZjI6snIjJiOiYVb 6ZGTHJCLiMWYtJiOxwiIoRnI6EzN5IjN3ADN1YDLi0mI6ICMx0UNBpFWxg0M2g1Q0Q0RLBjWBpkN YdjUIJCLiQnI6EzN5IjN3ADN1QDLiQXbiojIwETT1gEUW1kSxMzVYljUQVERBR1MER1UUZjIsICe iojItFmb1FGbi0Xf..EDMxEDMx0UNBpFWxg0M2g1Q0Q0R..
- X-Mailer-Info-Extra
- 346e1a6baa:0HRENDhlNzgUMYpVQ10UMwETMwEDApBQf9JCbh Vnbh1mI6ICeiwiI2Q1UUR0MUFERFBlU5g1VzEjSNZFUIVTTxAjI6ISb0JCL0UDNwcjNyk zNxojI0JCLigkU3glNKFkWws0RERzQYZzMIFDWaFUNNFDMiojItJCL2UDNwcjNykzNxoj I0hmIsEjOi0WYjJCLicETmpXbWJiOiMmI7pjI2Q1UUR0MUFERFBlU5g1VzEjSNZFUIVTT xAjI7BCAjBwZy9mLlZXaoNmchh3bi5WaAFmblJXY++
- X-Kmail-Account
- VmzfLG
- X-Kmail-Message
- 01M5AZX1H36XC4DGK0ZAJ6X7RH
- X-Kmail-Ops
- 01M2DNQM9PBPXNRBNYYSX9216V
Unsubscribe and feedback
- CFBL-Address
- [email protected]; report=arf
- List-Unsubscribe
- <https://manage.kmail-lists.com/…>, <mailto:…@shared.klaviyomail.com>
- List-Unsubscribe-Post
- List-Unsubscribe=One-Click
- X-Report-Abuse
- Please report any spam or abuse to: [email protected]
Message
- Date
- Thu, 22 Oct 2026 12:00:56 +0000
- MIME-Version
- 1.0
- Message-ID
- <[email protected]>
- Reply-To
- <[email protected]>
- Subject
- A Memory Palace for Software
- From
- "Arena Magazine" <[email protected]>
- Content-Type
- multipart/alternative; boundary=e481f9089894e99c1d6c18e23a0f7bc2fe63dc086511a64114484a600891
More from Arena Magazine
All 15 emailsArchived for reference and commentary. Arena Magazine, its logos and content are the property of their respective owners; Inbox Archive claims no affiliation and has disabled all links. If you own this content and would like it removed, get in touch.