Even Before Memex, a Plan For a Networked World

phlurg writes "The New York Times presents an amazing article on 'the Mundaneum,' a sort of proto-WWW conceived of by Paul Otlet in 1934. 'In 1934, Otlet sketched out plans for a global network of computers (or "electric telescopes," as he called them) that would allow people to search and browse through millions of interlinked documents, images, audio and video files. He described how people would use the devices to send messages to one another, share files and even congregate in online social networks. He called the whole thing a "réseau," which might be translated as "network" — or arguably, "web."' A fascinating read." (You may be reminded of Vannevar Bush's "Memex," which shares some of the same ideas.)

Good for him ...

It shows the difficult part of ideas isn't dreaming them up, it's actually realizing them.

Re:Good for him ...

I'm not sure I would agree with that. The best ideas are ones that seem obvious in retrospect, but had never been considered before. In some cases, implementation can be trivial, the real revolution is in proposing the solution.

Re:

I think parent is confusing, "best" with most celebrated/lucrative. What defines a great idea should have as much to do with its effect as how hard it was to conceive.

Re:Good for him ...

That's my cue to point out that E.M. Forster not only predicted the network and it's social effects, but forecast doom when the system runs out of capacity and engineering clue. If you haven't read it yet, read it now - it's short and great.

The Machine Stops [uiuc.edu]. (Written in 1909, as in ninety-nine years ago. In England.)

Re:Good for him ...

Seeing as no one else did it in the intervening 50 years, I'd not be too quick to call that the easy part.

What's interesting to me is to see if any of this stuff can be submitted as prior art to invalidate as many of the recent web patents as possible.

Re:Good for him ...

That's actually why I think patents aren't very useful.

If someone is really innovative even 30 years of monopoly isn't enough to help them - since most people won't get it.

But 30 years of monopoly would be terrible for > 99.99% of the approved patents (which are mostly pretty obvious - e.g. once you encounter the problem, the solution is easily found by anyone competent in the field).

The real innovators are so many steps ahead - they'll think of various problem, then the solutions, and then the problems with the solutions, and then the solutions for those problems, and so on, till they are decades ahead of everyone else.

As for those who say you should actually implement stuff to be able to claim a patent, I give the example of Douglas Engelbart and his team - they actually implemented a lot of stuff, and most people didn't get it till many decades later.

So to me I don't really think there should be patents on inventions - nowadays > 99.99% of them are just trivial junk that clutter up everything and get in the way of real progress. As is they are a net minus to the world. Giving 20 year monopolies to such "innovators" is a travesty, and allowing them to make a minor change and thus extend the monopoly for even longer is crazy - how does that encourage innovation?

If you want to reward innovators, I'd say we should have Prizes for Innovation that are awarded years after - much like the Nobel Prizes. After 10 or 20 years we should be able to tell whether something is really innovative and important.

Perhaps the application fees could go to a fund used to award the prizes and for administrative costs. Money could also come from other sponsors.

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That's actually why I think patents aren't very useful.

If someone is really innovative even 30 years of monopoly isn't enough to help them - since most people won't get it.

The stated purpose of patents is to put innovative works into the public domain -- after a limited exclusivity period as a reward for doing so. The alternative to patents is going back to trade secrets and exclusive guilds, and that's really throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

I don't think any system can be fully prevented from bei

Re:Good for him ...

It shows the difficult part of ideas isn't dreaming them up, it's actually realizing them.

I disagree, look at the sketch books of Da Vinci, the man was clearly a genius. Just because he didn't have the technology to create the parts he needed, doesn't detract from the thought and creativity required to conceive them.

Otlet was definitely a visionary. He saw a need for an accessible and indexable catalog of information that was linked by context. Even 100 years ago people began choking on massive amounts of paper. Otlet was arguably the first to conceive of a novel solution to this problem. Just because he didn't have access to electronic mass storage and computing power doesn't mean that his idea wasn't brilliant.

As other posters have mentioned, just because hyper links and networks seem obvious today, 70 years ago the idea was just starting to form. Someone had to have the insight to envision them.

Reseau

He called the whole thing a "reseau," which might be translated as "network"

Indeed, "reseau" (but with an accent, which didn't show up when I pasted it) is the word used in French for "network", in both computer and other senses.

This is not like Memex

The Memex was (or would have been) a personal workstation, not a networked device. True, it had hyperlinking, but only among documents on the same device. This Mundaneum seems to be entirely network-centric.

"Might" be translated as network?

He called the whole thing a "réseau," which might be translated as "network"

What do you mean by "might" be translated as network?

Réseau is the french word for network!

It's all hypothetical

French is a fictional language, much like Klingon or Tolkien's Elvish languages. No one speaks it natively, so what words might mean is of little practical value.

Re:It's all hypothetical

No one speaks it natively, so what words might mean is of little practical value.

You are so off target. Just as certain trekkies try to teach their children Klingon from birth, there have been two experiments by Francophiles to teach children French. Louisiana was one, but it failed when the U.S. bought the Louisiana purchase from the Japanese. Quebec is the other, and it has actually worked to the point of many "French" Canadians moving to the southern portion of the German state of Belgium and making a fake country. Now everyone in Belgium speaks French, and only 1/15 of Belgium is considered Belgium today.

Best of Otlet's Original Writings in English

As Paul Otlet's Wikipedia article [wikipedia.org] notes:

His 1934 masterpiece, the Traité de documentation, was reprinted in 1989 by the Centre de Lecture publique de la Communauté française in Belgium. The original edition has recently been digitized ( https://archive.ugent.be/handle/1854/5612 [ugent.be] ). Unfortunately, neither the Traité nor its companion work, "Monde" (World) has been translated into English so far. In 1990 Professor W. Boyd Rayward published an English translation of some of Otlet's best writings (available at http://hdl.handle.net/2142/4004 [handle.net] ).

Otlet would probably be very satisfied that we'd come far enough to his life's vision that we can just hear about him, then click to read his vision (of hearing about him then clicking to read his vision).

Google video: The Web That Wasn't

Everybody interested in the history of the web and its predecessors in the line of networked electronic information storage, management and retrieval systems should check out Alex Wright's talk at Google called "The Web That Wasn't": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72nfrhXroo8 [youtube.com]. Very interesting!

Science fiction to science fact

That ranks right up there with Jules Verne, Victor Appleton (The house name author of five generations of Tom Swift Novels), and (sadly) George Orwell in the Accurate Vision of the Future category.

Why didn't he pick up...

...some surplus machines from Babbage & Co.?

Kidding aside, anyone who can look at an enormous, overwhelming task of such mind-boggling complexity and think "I can do that." is deserved of high praise, regardless of whether he succeeded or failed.

A Logic Named Joe (1946)

Twelve years later than, but more accurately predicting the internet and sites like Google.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Logic_Named_Joe [wikipedia.org]

The story's narrator is a "logic" (that is, a personal computer) repairman nicknamed Ducky. In the story, a logic named Joe develops some degree of sentience and ambition. Joe proceeds to switch around a few relays in "the tank" (one of a distributed set of central information repositories analogous to servers on the World Wide Web) and connect all information ever assembled to every logic, and simultaneously disables all of the censor devices. Logics everywhere begin offering up unexpected assistance, from designing custom chemicals to alleviate inebriation to giving sex advice to small children or plotting the perfect murder. Information runs rampant as every logic worldwide crunches away at problems too vast in scope for human minds.

the most fascinating part of the article, to me

concerns otlet's upbringing:

Otlet, born in 1868, did not set foot in a schoolroom until age 12. His mother died when he was 3; his father was a successful entrepreneur who made a fortune selling trams all over the world. The senior Otlet kept his son out of school, out of a conviction that classrooms stifled children's natural abilities. Left at home with his tutors and with few friends, the young Otlet lived the life of a solitary bookworm.

When he finally entered secondary school, he made straight for the library. "I could lock myself into the library and peruse the catalog, which for me was a miracle," he later wrote. Soon after entering school, Otlet took on the role of school librarian.

In the years that followed, Otlet never really left the library. Though his father pushed him into law school, he soon left the bar to return to his first love, books. In 1895, he met a kindred spirit in the future Nobel Prize winner Henri La Fontaine, who joined him in planning to create a master bibliography of all the world's published knowledge.

obviously you can see how his upbringing shaped his life's work and life's focus. to me, there are all kinds of crazy pluses and minuses to this idea of stifling your child's social upbringing in order to encourage his intellectual upbringing. of course, you need social skills in life to really succeed. at the same time, there is something genuinely valuable to be said about focusing a child's intellectual development in solitude. there's obvious trade offs here, but otlet seems to be a success, in a narrow focused way. one wonders at examples of lives that are failures of this kind of upbringing though

people always mention the successes of this kind of focused upbringing, like tiger woods or the williams sisters in tennis (parents focusing their kid's athletic talents). or parents who focus their children to be masters of the piano or cello. but for every yo-yo ma, one never hears about the hundreds who wind up as burn-outs, drug addicts or prostitutes

its an interesting subject, the focused childhood solitary education

1844: Telegraph as the first InterNet

In some respect the invention of the telegraph changed the world forever because communications could be simultaneous around the earth. This would prevent gaffs like the Battle of New Orleans fought 29 years earlier, TWO WEEKS after the treaty ending that war had been signed because communications were so slow.

The capital burden of laying wires across continents and oceans helped create the modern corporations and banks. (In conjunction with railroads, steel, coal and petroleum development). There were wild economic booms and busts, not unlike the mainframes in the 1960s. PCs in the 1980s and dot.coms in the 1990s. The telegraph fueled modern media with a desire for today's news rather than weeks old letter and magazines.

The telegraph spawned other modern inventions. Randall Stoss's recent biography of Thomas Edison re-interprets the inventor in light of the dot.com boom. Several of Edison's inventions were aimed at cramming more messages on precious telegraph lines. The telephone arose out of the effort to send messages at different messages at separate frequencies. Voice is just using all frequencies. Several people beat Edison here, but he invented the first practical microphone. The phonograph was originally intended to record telegraph messages offline, then transmit them and record them at super-human speeds across precious telegraph lines. Recording and playing messages by themselves without the intervening telegraph became its own invention - the phonograph.

Re:

It might be where you are from (UK maybe?) Im in Canada, and it works fine, and I would assume that in the US it does aswell...

You could try...
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/06/17/healthscience/17mund.php [iht.com]

same article.

Re:

Works fine for me. Here's the single page version from the same site. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/17/science/17mund.html?_r=1&oref=slogin&ref=science&pagewanted=print [nytimes.com]

Re:What a visionary!

Well I remember watching a documentary over the mondaneum (I'm belgian). Pre WWII he enjoyed a relatively popularity in Belgium and amongst the intelligentsia around the world. Besides the mondaneum I remember that he tried to create somekind of a 'universal city' where human knowledge would have been concentrated and archived.

He did try to settle it somewhere near Antwerp (If I remember well) but nobody truly wanted it. I think he tried to settle it somewhere in Switzerland but it didn't work either (or maybe just part of his project, I really don't know anymore).

During the occupation, Nazi (and/or collaborators) were truly concerned about his pacifism, the mondaneum was located in the cinqantenaire (a famous building in brussels). I think (but it should be checked) that they did whatever they can to force him to leave. His real tragedy was when thugs came in and took all his archives, with no regards for their complex classification, loosing parts of it...Everything became unclassified and thus almost lost entirely too.

Then the remaining mundaneum archived have been moved to Mons. He did his best to revive his project and it never worked like before WWII.
Sad story.

Re:What a visionary!

the whole concept of "online communities" is a rather new idea (about 3 to 5 years at the most)

I must have imagined usenet then I guess.

Even in the strict web-based sense of online communities with registration, member profiles, forums and so on, I was working building them in the late nineties so they have definitely been around for longer than 3-5 years.

You could argue that online social networking communities (i.e. systems that create networks of users based on their relationships) are a more recent development, but there are some older examples of them around - they just didn't get into the mainstream.

Re:

Wow, yeah, very interesting, its also a month after May 17th too, in 2008 no less, which follows 2007...

The shitty part about New Scientist, is that it requires a subscription, whereas NYT/IHT doesnt, albeit some stories are a month late, but then again, isnt the entire story well over half a century late?