Odd this story doesn't mention Brewster Kahle, who AFAIK came up with the idea of archiving the Web. I heard people joke about it in its early years, too. I'm glad he took it seriously.
The Internet Archive is definitely up there with Wikipedia as one of mankind's greatest treasures. It really should be globally funded and endowed for the foreseeable future.
How do they afford all those disks?
TLDR: 22 petabytes, stored redundantly as 44 petabytes, and a warehouse of physical media (books, vinyl records) that grows by a 'shipping container' every two weeks.
edit: Also this article mentions a bunch of things I didn't know about (e.g. playable 80s video game archive) so its worth reading.
Wonder what the operating budget of the organization is.
I donate $50 a year, because it's pretty much the only site I can check every month or so and reliably expect that it will be better since the last time I visited.