Weaving the World Wide Web - The Computing Universe: A Journey through a Revolution - page 223

Fig. 11.3. Sketches of Ted Nelson's early
global hypertext system from 1965. He
also referred to this idea as a document
universe or “docuverse.” There are two
types of links in this picture: the dotted
lines represent normal hyperlinks, and
the braided lines, representing links that
point to quotations from other docu-
ments, Nelson called “transclusion” links.
The system also introduced the idea of
parallel text that enables us to see several
related documents at the same time, as
if we had several pages in front of us on
a desk.
the docuverse ( Fig. 11.3 ). However, it was not until 1998 that the first, still incom-
plete, Xanadu system was released and by then, the growth of the World Wide
Web was already well under way. Although the present-day World Wide Web
incorporates some aspects of his vision, Nelson calls Tim Berners-Lee's version
of hypertext “precisely what we were trying to PREVENT - ever-breaking links,
links going outward only, quotes you can't follow to their origins, no version
management, no rights management.” 6
Vannevar Bush concluded his 1945 article with a surprisingly accurate
vision of today's world of information. He accurately foresaw the emergence
of such things as Wikipedia and social networks but totally missed the central
role now occupied by Internet search engines:
Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready made with a mesh of
associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the memex
and there amplified. The lawyer has at his touch the associated opinions and
decisions of his whole experience, and of the experience of his friends and
authorities. The patent attorney has on call the millions of issued patents,
with familiar trails to every point of his client's interest. The physician,
puzzled by a patient's reactions, strikes the trail established in studying
an earlier similar case, and runs rapidly through analogous case histories,
with side references to the classics for the pertinent anatomy and histology.
The chemist, struggling with the synthesis of an organic compound, has all
the chemical literature before him in his laboratory, with trails following
the analogies of compounds, and side trails to their physical and chemical
behavior.
The historian, with a vast chronological account of a people, parallels it
with a skip trail which stops only on the salient items, and can follow at any
time contemporary trails which lead him all over civilization at a particular
epoch. There is a new procession of trail blazers, those who find delight in
the task of establishing trails through the enormous mass of the common
record. The inheritance of the master becomes, not only his additions to the
world's record, but for his disciples the entire scaffolding by which they were
erected. 7