Tim Berners-Lee created the world wide web in 1989. But the idea of hypertext stretches back much further.
If you read about the history of computing and the Internet, you'll surely read about Vannevar Bush's Memex concept, Douglas Engelbart's Mother of All Demos, Ted Nelson's Xanadu, and maybe even H.G. Wells's World Brain. If you've never explored this history, you can check out last week's Tech Time Warp, the BBC's 1990 documentary Hyperland.
But there's one name that's all too often left off lists of hypertext visionaries: Paul Otlet.
Otlet was a bibliographer by trade, and he endeavored to organize the world's information decades before Google's founders were even born. In 1934, as explained in the excerpt above from the documentary
The Man Who Wanted to Classify the World, Otlet published a treatise about what he called the "televised book" or the "radiated library."
His idea was to make a massive collection of documents available, automatically, on screens connected through telephone lines. The radiated library wouldn't be limited to text, but could include audio and even films.
As explained in Alex Wright's article on Otlet for Boxes and Arrows, the core of the universal book would have been a mechanical database consisting of an index card system that not only indexed documents, but the relationships between those documents. Decades before Berners Lee's creation, Otlet referred to the idea as a "web" of information, and the connections between documents as "links."
Otlet eventually convinced the Belgian government to allow him to put his ideas into practice in an old government building, which included over 15 million index cards. He called it the “The Mundaneum,” or "city of knowledge."
Sadly, the government cut funding for the project before it was completed, and soon the Nazis dismantled the work to make room for a Third Reich art exhibit.
Though the Mundaneum was never completed, and Otlet is constantly overlooked, he made a huge contribution to library science in the form of the Universal Decimal Classification, widely considered to be the first faceted classification system, which is still used in some European libraries today.
