Post date: Jun 12, 2012 10:45:9 PM
The unofficial guest of honor at the panel was Vinton Cerf, know universally as the "Father of the Internet" for co-inventing its fundamental technology, a system for routing packets of data around the globe called TCP/IP. Working on a U.S. Military project called ARPAnet starting in the 1960s, Cerf and colleagues developed the tech that would eventually become the Internet that dominates our lives today. [Internet Gets Out of Beta with IPv6 Tech]
But panel member Alex Wright, who heads up the "user experience" team at The New York Times, reminded the audience that the ideas leading to the Internet have been around a lot longer. (Wright is also the author of the book "Glut: Mastering Information Through the Ages.")
In 1934, Paul Otlet realized that the wires and radio waves connecting the world could be used for more than chatter and entertainment, but also to bring the world's knowledge into any home.
In his Radiated Library vision, people would place a telephone call requesting information to a great library. It wasn't as easy as typing a question into Google, but Otlet was making the most of the technology he had.
Also according to YouTube notes for the video above:
Published on Jun 8, 2012 by Jackie Luo
A scientist in the 1930s may have been decades ahead of his time when he suggested combining a telephone connection with a TV screen.
While many have difficulty remembering the world without the internet, it was nothing more than imagination in 1934, when Paul Otlet described what would become the information superhighway.
Otlet, a Belgian scientist and author who is already regarded as the father of information science, was on to something when he published his Treaties on Documentation.
Decades before the iPad, the Kindle, or even the computer screen, Otlet was devising a plan to combine television with the phone to send and spread information from published works.
In his Treaties on Documentation, Otlet referenced what would become the computer when he wrote: 'Here the workspace is no longer cluttered with any books.
He went on to suggest that dividing a computer screen could show multiple books at once, a possible reference to opening a few browser windows or tabs at once.
He called his vision 'the televised book.' More than 30 years later, Otlet's writings were first put into practice.
The TechNewsDaily item is here.
That was one of the topics in a wild discussion on the history of the Internet, and its future, at the recent World Science Festival in New York City.
Forget Al Gore. The Internet — at least as a concept — was invented nearly a century ago by a Belgian information expert named Paul Otlet imagining where telephones and television might someday go.
A Belgian scientist conceptualized the at least something like the internet back in the 1930s. According to TechNewsDailyThe Internet Was Invented in 1934 (Sorta)
by Sean Captain, Managing Editor, TechNewsDaily 06 June 2012 03:37 AM ET