(4) Paul Otlet & the Mundaneum

• Otlet (1868-1944) was a Belgian lawyer and bibliographer who envisioned "the creation of a kind of artificial brain by means of cards containing actual information or simply notes or references"
• The "monographic principle": individual facts would be extracted from texts and put onto individual 3x5 cards that would be indexed and cross-referenced (hypertext)
• In 1895 he began building this system, called the Mundaneum, and amassed over 12 million cards
• Eventually the project collapsed under the strain of managing that much paper, and Otlet began to envision electronic alternatives

(5) Paul Otlet & the Mundaneum

(6) Wilhelm Ostwald & The Bridge

• Ostwald (1853-1932) was a Baltic German chemist and winner of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1909
• Used his prize money to finance Die Bruecke ("The Bridge"), an "international institute for the organizing of intellectual work", counting Marie Curie and Andrew Carnegie among its members
• Promoted the creation of a "world brain" along Otlet's principles
  • The monographic principle / hypertext
  • Standardization of paper sizes
  • Uniform indexing using Otlet's universal classification scheme

(7) H.G. Wells & the World Brain

There is no practical obstacle whatever now to the creation of an efficient index to all human knowledge, ideas and achievements, to the creation, that is, of a complete planetary memory for all mankind. ... The whole human memory can be, and probably in a short time will be, made accessible to every individual. ... It need not be concentrated in any one single place. It need not be vulnerable as a human head or a human heart is vulnerable. It can be reproduced exactly and fully, in Peru, China, Iceland, Central Africa, or wherever else seems to afford an insurance against danger and interruption. ... It is a matter of such manifest importance and desirability for science, for the practical needs of mankind, for general education and the like, that it is difficult not to believe that in quite the near future, this Permanent World Encyclopaedia, so compact in its material form and so gigantic in its scope and possible influence, will not come into existence.

H.G. Wells, "World Brain: The Idea of a Permanent World Encyclopaedia" [https://sherlock.ischool.berkeley.edu/wells/world_brain.html], 1937

(8) Emanuel Goldberg

• Goldberg (1881-1970) was a Russian Jew, chemist by training, who invented many key optical imaging technologies
  • He received his doctorate from Wilhelm Ostwald's institute
• In 1927 Goldberg built the first functioning document retrieval system to use electronics
  • "He would dial a number, would press a button and after three seconds the document would be projected [on a screen]"
  • Wells' (later) vision of a "World Brain" was based such microfilm technology
• In 1933 he was kidnapped by Nazis and disappeared into oblivion

(9) Vannevar Bush & the Memex

• Bush (1890-1974) was an American engineer and first director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, which oversaw the Manhattan Project to develop the atomic bomb
• In 1945 Bush published an essay in The Atlantic Monthly entitled "As We May Think," in which he described an imaginary personal information machine called the Memex
• Bush's ideas were based on his experiences building a "microfilm rapid selector" at MIT in the late 1930s
  • Unbeknownst to him he was recreating much of Goldberg's work from a decade earlier
• Bush's status as a pillar of the American scientific community and the wide popularity of his essay have resulted in his being credited with the ideas that led to the Web
  • Bush and Memex are token historical references in countless computer and information science papers
  Source: Michael Buckland, "Emanuel Goldberg, Electronic Document Retrieval, And Vannevar Bush's Memex" [http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~buckland/goldbush.html]

(11) Hypertext / Hypermedia

"Hypertext" is non-sequentially linked pieces of text or other information. If the focus of such a system or document is on non-textual types (1) of information, the term hypermedia is often used instead. In traditional printed documents, practically the only such link supported is the footnote [really?], so hypertext is often referred to as "the generalized footnote."

(1) E.g. graphics, sound, moving images from videodisks, executable programs.

Jakob Nielsen, "Hypertext '87 Trip Report" [http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=43953]

(12) Linear text

(13) Hypertext

(14) Hypertexts

(15) Xanadu

• Project Xanadu was the first computer hypertext project, founded in 1960 by Ted Nelson
• No implementation was relased until 1998, and that was incomplete
• Despite his failure to produce a working system, Nelson is responsible for popularizing ideas about hypertext
• His 1974 book Computer Lib/Dream Machines inspired many early computing and hypertext pioneers

(16) NLS/Augment

• NLS (oN-Line System) was developed by Doug Engelbart at the Stanford Research Institute in the 1960s
• NLS was the first working computer system to employ hypertext links
• Engelbart and his Augmentation Research group also invented the mouse and dividing the screen into windows

(17) NoteCards

• Developed at Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center) in 1984
• "Notecards" contain text, graphics, or images
• Notecards are connected into networks by links
• "Browsers" and "file boxes" are used to manage networks of cards and links

(18) HyperCard

• Developed at Apple and first released in 1987; bundled with all new Macs at that time
• The most successful hypermedia system prior to the Web
• A "stack" of virtual "cards", similar to NoteCard
• HyperCard was the inspiration [http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WikiWikiHyperCard] for the first wiki

(19) Hypertext/Hypermedia Research

• These are just a few of the many, many hypertext and hypermedia systems developed during the 1970s and 1980s
• Hypertext was a very active area of research in academia and industry
• By 1987 there was a conference (ACM Conference on Hypertext and Hypermedia) that is still going on today
• However, the Web did not arise from this community and was initially rejected by it

(21) A global information space

Suppose all the information stored on computers everywhere were linked, I thought. Suppose I could program my computer to create a space in which anything could be linked to anything. All the bits of information in every computer at CERN, and on the planet, would be available to me and to anyone else. There would be a single, global information space.

Tim Berners-Lee, Weaving the Web [http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/41238513]

(22) CERN

• Pan-European laboratory for research in nuclear physics using particle colliders
• Experiments take months to complete, generate massive amounts of data, and involve hundreds or thousands of scientists around the world
• 100s of networked computers needed to control the colliders, monitor the experiments and manage data
  • By 1990 CERN is the largest Internet node in Europe
• 1989: The Large-Electron Positron (LEP) collider is completed
  • Tim Berners-Lee proposes [http://www.w3.org/History/1989/proposal.html] a new distributed information system in relation to the next-generation facility, the LHC (completed in 2007)

(23) Tim Berners-Lee

• 1980: TBL begins work as a contract programmer at CERN and builds ENQUIRE, a hypertext system to help him keep notes
  • named after a Victorian-era reference book with short entries indexed and cross-referenced
• 1984: TBL returns to CERN to work on getting networked computers to coordinate with one another
  • begins thinking about how to re-implement ENQUIRE so that it could be distributed across multiple computers
• 1989: TBL makes his initial proposal [http://www.w3.org/History/1989/proposal.html] to CERN management
  • A "distributed hypertext system" for managing information at CERN

(24) TBL's Requirements

• Remote access
  • accessible over the network from anywhere
• Heterogeneity
  • accessible across different kinds of computers and operating systems
• Non-centralization
  • link together existing and new systems without central control or coordination
• Access to existing data
  • provide access to existing databases as though they were in hypertext form

(25) TBL's Requirements

• Private links
  • add one's own private links to and from public information
• Display
  • ASCII text on a 24x80 screen sufficient, graphics optional
• Data analysis
  • some degree of automatic analysis to see structural patterns among the linked nodes
• Live links
  • every time a link is followed, the latest version of the information is retrieved

(26) TBL's Non-requirements

Discussions on Hypertext have sometimes tackled the problem of copyright enforcement and data security. These are of secondary importance at CERN, where information exchange is still more important than secrecy.

Tim Berners-Lee, Information Management: A Proposal [http://www.w3.org/History/1989/proposal.html], March 1989

A 3rd non-requirement: link integrity. Earlier hypertext systems did not allow for broken links, and thus required central coordination. TBL's system simply returned an error when a link pointed to a non-existent node.

(27) Sidenote: The Web vs. Gopher

• Gopher [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_(protocol)] is a networked hypertext system that was developed at the University of Minnesota around the same time as the Web (1991)
• From 1991-1993 it was very popular at universities
• The open architecture of the Web made it easy to incorporate Gopher sites, but not vice-versa
• In 1993 U of M announced that they would begin charging licensing fees, driving many users to adopt the Web instead

(28) Sidenote: The Web vs. Gopher

(29) Early milestones

• November 1990: First Web server, and Web page, come online
• Christmas 1990: WorldWideWeb browser [http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/FAQ.html#browser] demonstrated (screenshot [http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/tims_editor])
• February 1993: First version of NCSA Mosaic browser [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosaic_(web_browser)] released (screenshot [http://www.computerhistory.org/timeline/images/1993_mosaic_browser_large.jpg])
• March 1994: Marc Andreessen and colleagues leave NCSA to form "Mosaic Communications Corp." (later Netscape [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape])
• May 1994: First International WWW Conference [http://www.cern.ch/WWW94/] held at CERN
• October 1994: World Wide Web Consortium [http://www.w3.org/] founded; Netscape browser relased
• August 1995: Microsoft releases Internet Explorer 1 [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_1] (screenshot [http://www.microsoft.com/library/media/1033/windows/IE/images/community/columns/old_ie.gif])
• July 1995: Amazon.com [http://amazon.com] launches (screenshot [http://www.tranquileye.com/cyber/1995/amazondotcom_1995.gif])

(30) Conclusions

Like earlier attempts at building a "global information space", the Web was designed in response to the information management needs of large-scale, institutional science. Tim Berners-Lee was able to build upon previous technologies and incorporate ideas from previous systems to meet these needs. His emphasis on decentralization, use of existing infrastructure, and decision to make WWW technology freely available enabled it to spread and grow quickly. The 1993 decision to allow commercial uses of the Internet, and suitability of Web technology for e-commerce, resulted in explosive economically-fueled growth. In the process of its remarkable growth, however, some of the properties of the early web were de-emphasized (e.g. symmetry between reading and writing).