First Visions of the internet and the world wide web
Great inventions are usually imagined long before they are practical.
What's interesting are the ideas about why an inventnion seems to be needed.
Here H.G. Wells sees a need to replace universities (yes!) while Bush just wants to reorganize his notes. Later, Greenberg and Nelson predict the future with amazing accuracy.
(From Web Design for the Mass Media by Bill Kovarik)
HG WELLS
Science Fiction Author
The World Brain
Both the assembling and the distribution of knowledge in the world at present are extremely ineffective ... [We] are beginning to realize that the most hopeful line for the development of our racial intelligence lies rather in the direction of creating a new world organ for the collection, indexing, summarizing and release of knowledge, than in any further tinkering with the highly conservative and resistant university system. — World Brain: The Idea of a Permanent World Encyclopedia, Encyclopédie Française,August, 1937.
VANNEVAR BUSH
White House Science Advisor
Consider a future device for individual use, which is a sort of mechanized
private file and library.... A “memex” is a device in which an
individual stores all his books, records, and communications [which]
may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility.... Wholly new
forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready made with a mesh of associative
trails running through them.... There [will be] a new profession
of trail blazers ... who find delight in the task of establishing useful
trails through the enormous mass of the common record.
—“As We May Think,” Atlantic Monthly, July 1945.
MARTIN GREENBERGER Computer Engineer
Barring unforeseen obstacles, an on-line interactive computer service,
provided commercially by an information utility, may be as commonplace
by 2000 AD as telephone service is today. By 2000 AD man should have
a much better comprehension of himself and his system, not because he
will be innately any smarter than he is today, but because he will have
learned to use imaginatively the most powerful amplifier of intelligence
yet devised. —“The Computers of Tomorrow,” Atlantic Monthly, May 1964
TED NELSON
Philosopher
Forty years from now (if the human species survives), there will be hundreds of thousands of files servers. And there will be hundreds of millions of simultaneous users. All this is manifest destiny. There is no point in arguing it, either you see it or you don’t.
—Literary Machines, 1981.
By “hypertext” I mean nonsequential writing—text that branches and allows choice to the reader, best read at an interactive screen. —Computer Lib, 1974