Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
2
Networking and Internetworking
The origin of what has developed to become the Internet and World Wide
Web (WWW) goes back to work done in the early 1940s by Vannevar Bush.
He was the originator of the concept of an associative system for the orga-
nization of data within networks (the other being the concept of breaking
messages into discrete smaller packages to maximize efficiency by utilizing
the networks effectively). Bush was an American scientist who had done
work on submarine detection for the US Navy. Bush, who was C. Shannon's
professor at MIT, had built the differential analyzer that sat in the base-
ment of the Moore School and had facilitated further computing develop-
ments during the Second World War from his position in the US Office of
Scientific Research and Planning.
Bush's influence on the development of the Internet is due to his visionary
description of an information management system that he called the memex .
The memex (memory extender) is described in his famous essay “As We May
Think,” which was published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1945. This article rep-
resents the first published articulation of the idea of a web. Bush conceived
of what he called the memex, essentially a microfilm/audio recording device
electronically linked to a library and able to display topics and ilms that
would allow selection by association rather than by indexing . The memex was
to be a sort of multiscreened microfilm reader operated by a keyboard into
which a user could scan an entire personal library as well as all notes, letters,
and communications. When data of any sort are placed in storage, they are
filed alphabetically or numerically, and information is found (when it is) by
tracing it down from subclass to subclass. It can only be in one place. The
human mind does not work that way. It operates by association. With one
item in its grasp, it snaps instantly to the next that is suggested by the asso-
ciation of thoughts, in accordance with some intricate web of trails carried
by the cells of the brain.
This description motivated Ted Nelson and Douglas Engelbart to inde-
pendently formulate the various ideas that would become hypertext. Doug
Engelbart, had demonstrated a prototype information retrieval system at
the 1968 Fall Joint Computer Conference, and Ted Nelson was developer
of a similar system called Xanadu. In his self-published manifesto, Nelson
defined hypertext as “forms of writing which branch or perform on request;
they are best presented on computer display screens.” Nelson praised
Engelbart's On-Line System (NLS) but noted that Engelbart believed in
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