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L'Homme qui voulait classer le monde

[The man who wanted to classify the world]

The web that wasn't

In 1934, years before Vannevar Bush dreamed of the memex, decades before Ted Nelson coined the term hypertext, Paul Otlet envisioned a new kind of scholar's workstation: a moving desk shaped like a wheel, powered by a network of hinged spokes beneath a series of moving surfaces. The machine would let users search, read and write their way through a vast mechanical database stored on millions of 3x5 index cards.

This new research environment would do more than just let users retrieve documents; it would also let them annotate the relationships between one another, the connections each [document] has with all other [documents], forming from them what might be called the Universal Book.

Otlet imagined a day when users would access the database from great distances by means of an electric telescope connected through a telephone line, retrieving a facsimile image to be projected remotely on a flat screen.
In Otlet's time, this notion of networked documents was still so novel that no one had a word to describe these relationships, until he invented one: links.
Otlet envisioned the whole endeavor as a great réseauwebof human knowledge.

Check this, this and this if you want to know more on the man that imagined the internet years before it became reality.

Posted on December 23, 2003
in Linking context

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