Brewster Kahle, a Dec. 2 speaker at the Future of Money andTechnology Summit in San Francisco, stood behind a lectern in acrowded room and made a dramatic announcement about the creditunion he founded.

Many wanted to hear what Kahle, an early technology pioneer whomade the Internet consumer-friendly, had to say. He created theweb’s first publishing system, called Wide Area Information Server,in 1989 and sold it to AOL. He also co-founded Alexa Internet,which helps catalog the web that was purchased by Amazon.com in1999. The MIT computer science graduate also opened the InternetArchive in 1996, which preserves everything posted on the web – adigital library accessible to all.

With so much success throughout his life, Kahle’s words may havesurprised his audience when he described the death of a creditunion he opened just three years ago, the $2.5 million Internet Archive Federal Credit Union in New Brunswick,N.J.