The nearly 10 petabytes - equivalent to about 10 billion books - of material in the archive also has 900,000 audio files, including 9,000 fan-made recordings of Grateful Dead concerts. Volunteers are even converting old home movies and stock footage of post-World War II San Francisco into digital form. 'Optimist and utopian'The archive's mission of creating "universal access to all knowledge" would appear to be a Sisyphean task at best, as well as a venture that's not going to bring the 51-year-old entrepreneur and Internet pioneer the kind of money that would make a Mark Zuckerberg envious. [...] Kahle isn't motivated by the pursuit of money - he says he already has "plenty of that" from previous ventures, including Alexa Internet, a Web information company that Amazon.com bought for a reported $250 million in 1999. [...] as he begins a tour of the archive - the former Fourth Church of Christ, Scientist, a neoclassic building w ith Greek columns on Funston Avenue - he's more like a kid showing off a new toy. With wide eyes and a slight giggle, Kahle describes how, since locating there in 2009, archive workers outfitted old storage areas and other rooms with racks of ultramodern, custom-designed computer servers. Somehow, the servers still fit naturally with the old church pews, which these days are filled with rows of Kahle's own Terracotta Army - half-size clay statues that are a sort of archive themselves, representations of employees who have worked there for three years or more. Visionary geekKahle is a computer geek who can go "nerd-to-nerd with anybody," but he is still able to articulate his vision to a non-tech-savvy crowd, said Cindy Cohn, legal director for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Kahle is on the San Francisco digital rights advocacy organization's board of directors. Kahle, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the American Civil Liberties Union fo ught a 2007 attempt by the FBI to obtain personal information about an Internet Archive user, arguing that it was unconstitutional. Always searchingKahle was born in New Jersey, grew up in New York and studied artificial intelligence at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he was challenged to think about what he really wanted to do. While still in school, he tried to develop a chip that could encrypt telephone conversations, but "couldn't figure out how to do it cheaply enough to help the everyday person," he said. After graduating in 1982, he helped start a company called Thinking Machines, designing chips for supercomputers that could "search everything," he said. Archiving ephemeraAt the same time, Kahle co-founded the Internet Archive, and used Alexa Internet's Web-crawling technology to feed the catalog of sites in the Wayback Machine, a play on the name of a time machine used by the old TV cartoon character Mr. Peabody. The pro ject began Sept. 17 with a collection of 350,000 news programs digitally recorded during the last three years from domestic TV networks and stations in San Francisco and Washington. Kahle says he was moved to do something after talking to Internet Archive employees who scan books into digital form about how they struggle to meet high Bay Area rents every month. The first thing we needed was a bank that would be up for trying to help people more than the banks are doing these days, so we thought, 'OK, let's start a credit union.