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The Internet Networking Technology

Even Before Memex, a Plan For a Networked World 119

Posted by timothy from the da-vinci-invented-everything dept.
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.)
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Even Before Memex, a Plan For a Networked World More

Even Before Memex, a Plan For a Networked World

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  • Good for him ... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by YeeHaW_Jelte ( 451855 ) on Tuesday June 17, 2008 @08:06AM (#23822021) Homepage
    It shows the difficult part of ideas isn't dreaming them up, it's actually realizing them.

    • Re:Good for him ... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by njfuzzy ( 734116 ) <`moc.x-nai' `ta' `nai'> on Tuesday June 17, 2008 @08:10AM (#23822073) Homepage
      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.

      • 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 ... (Score:5, Informative)

        by call-me-kenneth ( 1249496 ) on Tuesday June 17, 2008 @08:54AM (#23822577)
        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.)

        • Wow!

          You have just opened my eyes to a new E M Forster - far from the A Passage to India that I was subjected to at school.

          It's almost Michael Moorcock in it's imagination.

          Thanks :o)

        • WOW, great read. I wonder if THX1138 took just a little inspriration from this, because the imagery is about the same.

        • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

          by thewebdude ( 1276170 )
          No, no, no...Tesla invented the interwebs, too:

          http://www.damninteresting.com/?p=703

          In 1908, Tesla described his sensational aspirations in an article for Wireless Telegraphy and Telephony magazine:

          "As soon as completed, it will be possible for a business man in New York to dictate instructions, and have them instantly appear in type at his office in London or elsewhere. He will be able to call up, from his desk, and talk to any telephone subscriber on the globe, without any change whatever in the existi

        • Just wanted to reply and say thanks for the read - incredible prescience, and very eye opening.

          Thanks, mate. That's something that's going on the all-time favourites list.

          • Aww shucks :) Credit really goes to a Mr John P. Moran of the Royal Forest of Dean Grammar School, circa 1984; a really great teacher. He was genuinely enthusiastic about literature and one always felt he was genuinely trying to open his student's eyes to whatever it was he was teaching, rather than just teaching a set curriculum. (Of course this was before the days of a centralised government-defined curriculum "teaching" the same topic to every kid in the country doing Year 2 English Lit on any given day

    • Re:Good for him ... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by samkass ( 174571 ) on Tuesday June 17, 2008 @08:39AM (#23822415) Homepage Journal
      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 ... (Score:5, Interesting)

        by TheLink ( 130905 ) on Tuesday June 17, 2008 @09:14AM (#23822815) Journal
        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.

        • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

          by nuzak ( 959558 )
          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: (Score:2)

            by vidarh ( 309115 )
            But it rarely satisfies the stated purpose. How many people read patents to find out how something works? Really? Many large companies even explicitly ask staff NOT to read patents, because they'd then encounter the risk of a court finding willful infringement with resulting higher judgements, or the risk of being forced to list prior art they'd prefer not to know about.

            If most patents are never actually used to find out how something works, then we get the downsides without the benefits.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by nuzak ( 959558 )
              I fully agree with you. I think the patent system needs a huge overhaul in order to get back to its original principle. This overhaul doesn't include abolishing it entirely.

              First of all, it'd be nice to be able to search only expired patents. But of course the whole "patent fence" nonsense going on makes even that risky. Back to the overhaul...

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by TheLink ( 130905 )
            I have news for you, we're already living in a world where that "baby" is already _dead_. So if we throw it out with the bathwater, I don't see how things would get worse.

            1) There are so many examples of cases where people/companies/organisations/countries kept secrets, but complex stuff was still reverse engineered or reinvented independently.
            2) People are using patents to hold monopolies for very long periods (as technology changes slightly, they patent a variation and so on), and for anticompetitive tact

    • Re:Good for him ... (Score:4, Informative)

      by txoof ( 553270 ) on Tuesday June 17, 2008 @08:44AM (#23822467) Homepage
      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.

      • Someone had to have the insight to envision them

        Damn you and your sig - I read 'envision' as 'embiggen', you cromulent git!

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by txoof ( 553270 )
          As we all know, invisioning technology can embiggen even the smallest mind.

          It is very important to check your grammar and make sure your usage is cromulent at all times.
    • "It shows the difficult part of ideas isn't dreaming them up, it's actually realizing them."

      Actually they are equally hard, idea quality matters and so does execution, the idea is ultimately a guide towards goals. Most of us when we think of great ideas do not have the understanding or necessary tools to realize them. Just like the fellow in the article above, he had a great ideas but to actally implent it would take enormous amounts of effort, willpower, desire and knowhow. Whole industries were founded
    • And timing them right. Video-conferencing was technically possible and indeed became available -- before its time.

    • Re: (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Murray Rothbard actually had great insight on this topic. His argument [mises.org] was that the availability of capital is the critical factor in technological progress, and not the generation of new ideas, which there are plenty of.

      Not to say that coming up with ideas in useless, indeed we'd be nowhere without them either. But so many good ideas like this one sit idle and never materialise because priorities of investors focus elsewhere.
    • Realizing something like the www in the 1930's would have been impossible, so this is a mute point. You can't deny the genius and the beauty of his idea, all those years ago, now come to fruition!

  • Reseau (Score:5, Informative)

    by langelgjm ( 860756 ) on Tuesday June 17, 2008 @08:10AM (#23822083) Journal

    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 (Score:5, Informative)

    by sp332 ( 781207 ) on Tuesday June 17, 2008 @08:13AM (#23822115)
    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.

  • Prior Art (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    The ultimate in prior art for the US Patent office. :-)
  • What an amazing visionary. Well I guess he was right on the button. Heck that basically describes web 2.0 before web 0.1 was invented. He is right on target.

    This kind of reminds me of the guy who wrote a 10 page article on the year 2008. He was right about a lot of things but was wrong about a ton of things (trailer homes, bubbles, going 300 mph in a computer driven car).

    But I must say this guy is a genius. He was 70 years ahead of his time because the whole concept of "online communities" is a rather new i

    • Re:What a visionary! (Score:5, Informative)

      by oliderid ( 710055 ) on Tuesday June 17, 2008 @08:30AM (#23822307) Journal

      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.

      • The article has details on most of the stuff you are questioning there, it's probably worth a read just to brush up on what you already know. It is interesting to wonder what would have happened had WWII not got in the way of this guys work, it is pretty sad..

        I found the end of the article quite amusing though:

        "The problem is that no one knows the story of the Mundaneum," said the lead archivist, Stephanie Manfroid. "People are not necessarily excited to go see an archive. It's like, would you rather go see the latest 'Star Wars' movie, or would you rather go see a giant card catalog?"

        Personally I'd much rather see a giant revolutionary card catalog system than watch the latest Star Wars movies again! :)

    • Re:What a visionary! (Score:4, Insightful)

      by actiondan ( 445169 ) on Tuesday June 17, 2008 @08:32AM (#23822333)

      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.

      • I must have imagined usenet then I guess.
        And BBSes and FidoNet and CompuServe and 'QuantumLink' (now known as AOL). Please.

      • 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.

        Errm.. and this guy envisioned that in the 1934, before electronic computers existed. His picture ought to be next to "visionary" in the dictionary.

        Envisioning something 5 years before it's widely used is future thinking, but not exactly an OMG type of revelation, but envisioning som

        • Taking issue with a specific statement in a post does not mean that I was disagreeing with the whole thing - that's why I quoted the part I was correcting.

          Otlet certainly was a visionary, but that doesn't change the fact that online communities are more than 3-5 years old.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by fabs64 ( 657132 )
        While you are correct, I think even Usenet was in its infancy pre-WWII :-)

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by makapuf ( 412290 )
        uuuhhh, maybe some site [slashdot.org]some of us know about can be labelled as an online community and was there before 3-5 years ago ?

      • 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.
        yeah and I must have imagined IRC too
      • What I meant was this whole idea of web 2.0 in general. Web 2.0 is a rather new idea. Before everything was basically content handed to you by a content creator now in days users make the content. And yes your right online communities have been around for more than 3-5 years. What I should have said was the Web 2.0 has only been around for 3-5 years.

        So yea we all make mistakes :P "Musta been a typo a typo a typo".

        I almost put 5-10 years that seems more reasonable.

        • Fair play for correcting yourself.

          I do have a bit of a problem with the whole "web 2.0" buzzword, because all I see really is an evolution of web collaboration technologies rather than something distinctly true, but I definitely agree that the cuirrent direction of the evolution is towards more and more user generated content. (personally, I think that at some point, the balance will start to swing back a bit as people realise that well written, well edited content is worth something)

          Ignore the anonymous tr

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Raenex ( 947668 )

          Web 2.0 is a rather new idea.
          No, it was just a new name to popularize existing ideas.

          Before everything was basically content handed to you by a content creator now in days users make the content.
          Before there was Second Life, there was MOO [wikipedia.org], circa 1990. Wikis were also created in the 90s.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by mgblst ( 80109 )
        Don't listen to these ramblings. Computer themselves have only been invented for about 10 years, when I got my first 486. That was the first microchip. This guy is clearly lying.
    • He didn't just write about it - he realised it in concrete (well, card) form.

      Only technology stopped him from being the father of the Web.

      Damn - I wish I'd known about this guy in the 70s - I'd have sewn the whole lot up in patents :o)

  • "Might" be translated as network? (Score:5, Informative)

    by Yvan256 ( 722131 ) on Tuesday June 17, 2008 @08:16AM (#23822163) Homepage Journal

    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 (Score:5, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 17, 2008 @08:33AM (#23822341)
      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: (Score:2)

      by Cheapy ( 809643 )
      Timothy: "Yo guys, what's the french word for 'network'."
      CowboyNeal: "Réseau!"
      Timothy: "Are you sure?"
      CowboyNeal: "Fairly."
      Timothy:

      Would _you_ trust CowboyNeal on French?

    • What do you mean by "might" be translated as network? Réseau is the french word for network!
      The problem with the French is they don't have a word for reseau or entrepreneur. --George Bush











      (yea yea yea) [snopes.com]

  • Best of Otlet's Original Writings in English (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Doc Ruby ( 173196 ) on Tuesday June 17, 2008 @08:23AM (#23822233) Homepage Journal
    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).

  • 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!

  • 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.
    • I'm still waiting for my repelatron drive and my visitor from Planet X.
    • and (sadly) George Orwell in the Accurate Vision of the Future category.

      Oh pleez, dramatic much? Spare me.

      If anything, Huxley's [wikipedia.org] work was far more accurate in predicting modern culture. Hell, there's even a muscle relaxant called Soma on the market!!

  • Why didn't he pick up... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by wandazulu ( 265281 ) on Tuesday June 17, 2008 @08:45AM (#23822471)
    ...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) (Score:3, Interesting)

    by objekt ( 232270 ) on Tuesday June 17, 2008 @08:45AM (#23822475) Homepage
    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.
  • I'm surprised that we aren't using it today. With a name like Mundaneum, people are sure to come running in droves.
    • "Mundus" is Latin for "world". So, unless I'm mistaken, A "Mundaneum" is essentially "where the world is kept".
      • Once I had to install some Veritas client back up software on an executive's laptop. This individual had an MBA. Do you know what he asked me?

        "What are Veritases?"

        The majority of the American population can't even speak english let alone latin.
  • We had communities before the internet. They were called Bulletin Boards Services (BBS) where people could hang out and exchange ideas. And back when the internet was this mythical thing that only people who lived in ivory towers could experience we had CompuServe followed later by the hideous beast AOL.

  • Folks,

    Réseau is the French word for "network", and we all know what France's only contribution to networking is. This was a proto-minitel. It is kinda like the internet, but you have to pay per-minute access fees, have slower connections, limited functionality, and have to work through a monopolistic PTT.

    - doug

    PS: Yes, he was Belgian, but who really can tell the difference?

    • the flemish?

    • PS: Yes, he was Belgian, but who really can tell the difference?
      The Germans?

    • It is kinda like the internet, but you have to pay per-minute access fees, have slower connections, limited functionality, and have to work through a monopolistic PTT.

      As opposed to what the telecoms are pushing for today with metered usage, P2P obstruction, throttling, etc., which is kinda like the internet, but you have to pay per-gigabyte access fees on top of monthly capacity fees, have slower connections except where the other end has paid a premium to be allowed to send you data at full speed, and have

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by doug ( 926 )
        Nope, not quite the same thing. I lived in France from 95-98, and I used the minitel for everything from directory assistance (ie - electronic phone book) to buying train tickets. Wait. That was about it. At 14.4 my dial up was faster, and only had phone usage rates. (No free local calls in France.) Mintel 1 (the only free one) was 1200 baud down and 75 baud up. One of the problems with the French (I saw this several times) is that they don't layer protocols worth a damn. Basically the signal proces

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by xlv ( 125699 )

          I lived in France from 95-98
          I think you've tried it too late as by then the internet was way better and the minitel was already on the decline. The BBS comparison mentioned in this thread was more accurate in the early-mid 80s before the internet was available to common folks and people were connected their C64/PCs to minitel to get extra services on top of the "online" shopping services available for the standalone minitel.

        • I lived in France from 95-98, and I used the minitel for everything from directory assistance (ie - electronic phone book) to buying train tickets.


          Yeah, by 95-98, I'd imagine the Minitel probably seemed pretty lame compared to the WWW. But the Minitel was introduced in the early 1982, and compared to what the US had readily available then, it doesn't look so bad.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by 4D6963 ( 933028 )

            I lived in France from 95-98, and I used the minitel for everything from directory assistance (ie - electronic phone book) to buying train tickets.

            Yeah, by 95-98, I'd imagine the Minitel probably seemed pretty lame compared to the WWW. But the Minitel was introduced in the early 1982, and compared to what the US had readily available then, it doesn't look so bad.

            Actually in my own experience the Minitel was still a great tool during that time because back then even if you had an Internet connection it didn't necessarily worked too well (well, mainly on the lousy Macintosh I had) to the point I can even recall browsing the web on a Lynx-browser like service on the Minitel around 1998. And of course browsing for 15 minutes would cost my parents about 30 Francs, but that was still better than hardly anything on the computer. And actually people (my family include) w

  • 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

    • one never hears about the hundreds who wind up as burn-outs, drug addicts or prostitutes
      Except if you talk to them. Then, wow, they never shut up about how goddamn great they were and how much potential they had.

      its an interesting subject, the focused childhood solitary education
      Hm? /. is full of intelligent people with the social skills of Oscar the Grouch. I'm one of them, you twat. ;)
  • I thought Al Gore invented the internet.... and pants.
  • was that it was called the mundane-um

    why not call it the snore-ium or boring-um

    anyone with knowledge of advertising or public relations knows you have to give something like this a snazzy name, the excite-o-porium, nor the neato-gonzo-hyperium, or the whatsthat?-OMFG-ium
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Why hasn't anyone mentioned this documents' potential as prior art? (Or have they).

    Are there any patents that would could be revoked based on prior art found in this document?

    "Fascinating, Jim."
  • YouTube has a nice video on the subject. http://youtube.com/watch?v=ZPBpXlZumNg [youtube.com]
  • ... the World Wide Waffle?
  • There's an interesting talk about this very topic up on youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72nfrhXroo8 [youtube.com]
  • The archive's sheer sprawl reveals both the possibilities and the limits of Otlet's original vision. Otlet envisioned a team of professional catalogers analyzing every piece of incoming information, a philosophy that runs counter to the bottom-up ethos of the Web.

    This seems more like a real-time encyclopedia than the entirety of the web, like the next step beyond the Encyclopedia Britannica with its professional editing of contributed articles. The Britannica would have been in the process of switching to u

  • 1844: Telegraph as the first InterNet (Score:3, Interesting)

    by peter303 ( 12292 ) on Tuesday June 17, 2008 @11:07AM (#23824455)
    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.
  • Even earlier, the concept of a world-spanning network of thought had previously been developed by other thinkers predominantly known in the French-speaking world as well (most notably dissident cleric Pierre Teilhard de Chardin [wikipedia.org]) under the name of noosphere [wikipedia.org] - the field of mind(s).

    It never seemed to have made much of an impact in English until famously picked up and popularized by Eric S. Raymond [catb.org] (and in another variant referred to by John Perry Barlow as "Cyberspace, the new home of Mind [eff.org]"), recognizing the
  • Why, when (insert some inventor/writer/anybody in particular) gets their life's work (jacked up by Nazis/eaten by elephants/some other horrible fate) are they always "broken"? Why not "pissed off for a couple of weeks" while they get really drunk, recover from the hangover and then update their resume so they can find a new job? Or, relieved that they can finally get on with their life and other things... like the honey do list the missus has been pestering them with since shortly after their honeymoon?

    I

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