The Web That Wasn't

Google Tech Talks
October, 23 2007

ABSTRACT

For most of us who work on the Internet, the Web is all we have ever really known. It's almost impossible to imagine a world without browsers, URLs and HTTP. But in the years leading up to Tim Berners-Lee's world-changing invention, a few visionary information scientists were exploring alternative systems that often bore little resemblance to the Web as we know it today. In this presentation, author and information architect Alex Wright will explore the heritage of these almost-forgotten systems in search of promising ideas left by the historical wayside.

The presentation will focus on the pioneering work of Paul Otlet, Vannevar Bush, and Doug Engelbart, forebears of the 1960s and 1970s like Ted Nelson, Andries van Dam, and the Xerox PARC team, and more recent forays like Brown's Intermedia system. We'll trace the heritage of these systems and the solutions they suggest to present day Web quandaries, in hopes of finding clues to the future in the recent technological past.

Speaker: Alex Wright
Alex Wright is an information architect at the New York Times and the author of Glut: Mastering Information Through the Ages. Previously, Alex has led projects for The Long Now Foundation, California Digital Library, Harvard University, IBM, Microsoft, Rollyo and Sun Microsystems, among others. He maintains a personal Web site at http://www.alexwright.org/

• Category

  People & Blogs

[tati5001]

Go back to posting those at google videos. youtube interface sucks big time.

[BiffChunksteak]

Classification and controlled vocabularies are not forgotten. Not by library information science, anyway. You see, us librarians, we tend to hold on to things just a little bit longer than your average software developper. Even the really old and uncool stuff doesn't get the boot as long as we can imagine any decent future use for it. You know, 'in case shit'.

[gosucoaching]

And that's why we have to start pyramid building...

[akashashen]

This is just incredible.  I love this lecture. This is the type of stuff I used to look forward to on the Research Channel.

[Antoine Carré]

For more information about Paul Otlet please look at this movie on mementoproduction.be

[wkiernan]

All these utopian schemes for the universal diffusion of all human knowledge! All brought to absolutely nothing by the influence of the Disney Corporation, which must extend copyright until the heat death of the sun in order to protect their iconic talking rat. Poor Paul Otlet! Hitler goosesteps in and throws away his card collection and Sonny Bono - Sonny Bono, for Christ's sake! - kicks over his gravestone

[FaradayToRemember]

also, software "developer".

[FUBUXGEAR]

a guy who wrote a book about web history and says "web 2.0" without refering to the bbs era, loses points in my book. and he seems to define the web as only being the network after mosaic, even though the web had been in existence for longer than that, and that the internet is something far beyond your web browser, though hg wells was right, STORM the first self defending autonomous botnet, first lifeform of the web era.