Xanadu

Ok well I've been trying to find a page so I can fix the link about how hypertext goes back centuries. I recall something how early scholars came up with the idea, and I think it had something to do with biblical texts and the printing press. Anyway, I havent found it yet, I'll keep looking, but what you might find of interest is the 'Memex' - a pre Xerox-Parc idea from the 1940's and the Xanadu project.

http://xanadu.com/tech/

(You may also be interested that although the Xanadu project, a precursor to 'The Web' itself, started off as a patented idea has now evolved into an open source work, Udanax.)

From http://www.microisv.com.ph/blog/hyperlink-history.html:
Hyperlink history

While Tim Berners-Lee’s work paved the way for the World Wide Web, it was Vannevar Bush who introduced the concept of linking documents into a single trail of information in his essay “As We May Think” published in 1945. Then in 1965, Ted Nelson, coined the term “hyperlink” for his Project Xanadu.

A random rant

'Dot-com'. Haha. Of course the bubble burst. There are two reasons for the rise of the Internet, and two reasons alone. Sex, and Nuclear Warfare. Not communications. Not business, or e-commerce as it is now known. No, everything else was just a by-product of those two primitives. It was funny watching everyone coming to their senses when the stock market crashed.

One such by-product was the 'Web', common to hear it incorrectly referred to as the 'internet' by the ignorati... (I used a lowercase to distinguish the use it as a synonym for 'world wide web', from the global physical network infrastructure of communications known as the 'Internet')

A new term arose, 'Web 2.0', to refer to the big, popular and dynamic sites which survived the economic downturn - and the common features of how they have created applications which have attracted cult status, like Amazon, eBay and FaceBook, for example.

Remember when 'multimedia' was the biggest craze in computing? Well hyperlinking was also just coming into play around that time, and whilst it may have been conceived many centuries ago (TODO:citation needed) it was Tim Berners-Lee who came up with the idea of hyperlinking documents on computers scattered across the globe, using a browser to locate them via the http:// protocol over the TCP/IP network largely unknown back then as the Internet (now known as 'surfing'), which was already in use for remote logins, email, network file sharing, and so on. So the 'Web' is just another application on the internet, much as peer-to-peer filesharing and bit-torrents are new protocols and ways of doing things via the Internet (get the difference now?)

Enough, its late, and I want to get to the point: in true retro 90's style, here is a link to a page about the World's first webserver, and the man who invented the 'Web'. (the origins of the Internet go back decades earlier, to the days of ARPANET) It doesnt predict the future, or what things you'll be downloading or doing on it next.

It always, always boils down to one thing though: your pipe is too small.

=P