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Even Before Memex, a Plan For a Networked World

Posted by timothy on from the da-vinci-invented-everything dept.

phlurg writes "The New York Times presents an amazing article on 'the Mundaneum,' a sort of proto-WWW conceived of by Paul Otlet in 1934. 'In 1934, Otlet sketched out plans for a global network of computers (or "electric telescopes," as he called them) that would allow people to search and browse through millions of interlinked documents, images, audio and video files. He described how people would use the devices to send messages to one another, share files and even congregate in online social networks. He called the whole thing a "réseau," which might be translated as "network" — or arguably, "web."' A fascinating read." (You may be reminded of Vannevar Bush's "Memex," which shares some of the same ideas.)

7 of 119 comments (clear)

  1. Good for him ... by YeeHaW_Jelte · · Score: 4, Insightful

    It shows the difficult part of ideas isn't dreaming them up, it's actually realizing them.

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    1. Re:Good for him ... by njfuzzy · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I'm not sure I would agree with that. The best ideas are ones that seem obvious in retrospect, but had never been considered before. In some cases, implementation can be trivial, the real revolution is in proposing the solution.

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    2. Re:Good for him ... by samkass · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Seeing as no one else did it in the intervening 50 years, I'd not be too quick to call that the easy part.

      What's interesting to me is to see if any of this stuff can be submitted as prior art to invalidate as many of the recent web patents as possible.

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      E pluribus unum
    3. Re:Good for him ... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

      Murray Rothbard actually had great insight on this topic. His argument was that the availability of capital is the critical factor in technological progress, and not the generation of new ideas, which there are plenty of.

      Not to say that coming up with ideas in useless, indeed we'd be nowhere without them either. But so many good ideas like this one sit idle and never materialise because priorities of investors focus elsewhere.
    4. Re:Good for him ... by nuzak · · Score: 2, Insightful

      That's actually why I think patents aren't very useful.

      If someone is really innovative even 30 years of monopoly isn't enough to help them - since most people won't get it.

      The stated purpose of patents is to put innovative works into the public domain -- after a limited exclusivity period as a reward for doing so. The alternative to patents is going back to trade secrets and exclusive guilds, and that's really throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

      I don't think any system can be fully prevented from being gamed, but it would be nice if there were at least some sensible refereeing.

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  2. Best of Otlet's Original Writings in English by Doc+Ruby · · Score: 3, Insightful
    As Paul Otlet's Wikipedia article notes:

    His 1934 masterpiece, the Traité de documentation, was reprinted in 1989 by the Centre de Lecture publique de la Communauté française in Belgium. The original edition has recently been digitized ( https://archive.ugent.be/handle/1854/5612 ). Unfortunately, neither the Traité nor its companion work, "Monde" (World) has been translated into English so far. In 1990 Professor W. Boyd Rayward published an English translation of some of Otlet's best writings (available at http://hdl.handle.net/2142/4004 ).


    Otlet would probably be very satisfied that we'd come far enough to his life's vision that we can just hear about him, then click to read his vision (of hearing about him then clicking to read his vision).
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  3. Re:What a visionary! by actiondan · · Score: 3, Insightful

    the whole concept of "online communities" is a rather new idea (about 3 to 5 years at the most)


    I must have imagined usenet then I guess.

    Even in the strict web-based sense of online communities with registration, member profiles, forums and so on, I was working building them in the late nineties so they have definitely been around for longer than 3-5 years.

    You could argue that online social networking communities (i.e. systems that create networks of users based on their relationships) are a more recent development, but there are some older examples of them around - they just didn't get into the mainstream.