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Posted by Toby Inkster on 01/15/06 14:43
Martin Janssen wrote:
> Apparently GW Bush's grandfather is responsible for coming up with the
> idea of hypertext
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vannevar_Bush
| Vannevar Bush (March 11, 1890 – June 30, 1974) was an
| American engineer and science administrator, known for
| his political role in the development of the atomic
| bomb, and idea of the memex—seen as a pioneering concept
| for the World Wide Web. [...] He was unrelated to the
| Bush political family.
The "memex" of his article doesn't really bear much relation to today's
WWW:
http://www.ps.uni-sb.de/~duchier/pub/vbush/vbush-all.shtml
| [The memex] consists of a desk, [...] slanting translucent
| screens, [...] sets of buttons and levers [...] microfilm
Even when he gets onto "associative indexing", it's a far cry from today's
implementations of hypertext. In his article the user buys newspapers,
journals, encycopaedias and so forth (on microfilm of course!), and adds
his own hyperlinks between pages. I doubt we Web would have caught on if
we'd all had to create our own links on every page we visited.
I'm not saying that he didn't contribute at all to the modern Web, but he
only "invented" it in the sense that George Stephenson invented the space
shuttle.
--
Toby A Inkster BSc (Hons) ARCS
Contact Me ~ http://tobyinkster.co.uk/contact
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