Architecture of theWorld WideWeb - Social Semantics: The Search for Meaning on the Web - page 9

2.1 The History of the Web

What is the Web, and what is its significance? At first, it appears to be a relative
upstart upon the historical scene, with little connection to anything before it, an
historical and unprincipled 'hack' that came unto the world unforeseen and with
dubious academic credentials. The intellectual trajectory of the Web is a fascinating,
if unknown, revolution whose impact has yet to be historically comprehended,
perhaps even by its creators. Although it is well-known that the Web bears some
striking similarity to Vannevar Bush's 'Memex' idea from 1945, the Web is itself
usually thought of more as a technological innovation rather than an intellectually
rich subject matter such as artificial intelligence or cognitive science (1945).
However, the Web's heritage is just as rich as artificial intelligence and cognitive
science, and can be traced back to the selfsame root, namely the 'Man-Machine
Symbiosis' project of Licklider (1960).

2.1.1 The Man-Machine Symbiosis Project

The first precursor to the Web was glimpsed, although never implemented, by
Vannevar Bush, chief architect of the military-industrial complex of the United
States of America. For Bush, the primary barrier to increased productivity was the
lack of an ability to easily recall and create records, and Bush saw in microfiche
the basic element needed to create what he termed the “Memex,” a system that lets
any information be stored, recalled, and annotated through a series of “associative
trails” (1945). The Memex would lead to “wholly new forms of encyclopedias
with a mesh of associative trails,” a feature that became the inspiration for links
in hypertext (Bush 1945). However, Bush could not implement his vision on the
analogue computers of his day.
The Web had to wait for the invention of digital computers and the Internet,
the latter of which bears no small manner of debt to the work of J.C.R. Licklider,
a disciple of Norbert Wiener (Licklider 1960). Wiener thought of feedback as an
overarching principle of organization in any science, one that was equally universal
amongst humans and machines (1948). Licklider expanded this notion of feedback
loops to that of feedback between humans and digital computers. This vision of
'Man-Machine Symbiosis' is distinct and prior to cognitive science and artificial
intelligence, both of which were very infantile disciplines at the time of Licklider,
and both of which are conjoined at the hip by hypothesizing that the human mind
can be construed as either computational itself or even implemented on a computer.
Licklider was not a true believer in the computational mind, but held that while
the human mind itself might not be computational (Licklider cleverly remained
agnostic on that particular gambit), the human mind was definitely complemented by
computers. As Licklider himself put it, “The fig tree is pollinated only by the insect
Blastophaga grossorun. The larva of the insect lives in the ovary of the fig tree,