Hypertext
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50 years ago, 'the mother of all demos' foretold our tech future
Innovation usually happens in slow, measured steps over many years, but a demo in 1968 transformed the world of personal computers in just 90 minutes. In a presentation dubbed "the mother of all demos," Douglas Engelbart showed off technology that would lead directly to Apple's Macintosh, the internet, Windows, Google Docs, the computer mouse and much, much more. The most insane part was that it happened 50 years ago in 1968, when microchips were just a gleam in scientists' eyes.
The first website went online 25 years ago today
If the web were a person, it wouldn't have trouble renting a car from now on: the world's first website, Tim Berners-Lee's World Wide Web, went online 25 years ago today. The inaugural page wasn't truly public when it went live at CERN on December 20th, 1990 (that wouldn't happen until August 1991), and it wasn't much more than an explanation of how the hypertext-based project worked. However, it's safe to say that this plain page laid the groundwork for much of the internet as you know it -- even now, you probably know one or two people who still think the web is the internet.
After 54 years as vaporware, the web's oldest ancestor is released
In 1960 Ted Nelson, the man who coined the term "hypertext", began work on his magnum opus -- Xanadu. In late April, after 54 years of development, the complex document builder and viewer was finally released with little to no fanfare at a Chapman University event. The concept behind the software should seem pretty familiar: documents could be embedded with clickable links that led you to directly to the quote or referenced information within another document. Clicking wouldn't close the primary document though, instead all of the source material is displayed simultaneously, shrinking down to stay out of the way, or scaling up for side-by-side comparisons when you need it. Had it not been for an unfortunate series of setbacks, we could have been talking about Ted Nelson as the father of the World Wide Web, instead of Tim Berners-Lee. But a lack of resources, especially money, meant that development dragged on for decades. Nelson doesn't think Xanadu is dead on arrival, though. While it may be too late to conquer the web, he believes it could take on the mighty PDF. The color-coded links and direct connections to reference material could prove quite useful in legal or research documents. Not to mention a handy way to archive web sites.
A forgotten Belgian genius dreamed up the internet over 100 years ago
Though we're pretty sure that time travelers don't exist, people were working on hypertext -- used by web browsers to retrieve connected information -- long before computers. It even predates the ideas of a certain Vannevar Bush, the man generally acknowledged as having laid the groundwork for hypertext by microfiche in a seminal 1945 article. Nope, according to the Atlantic, some people were pondering ways of storing and retrieving information prior even to the 20th century. A Belgian genius called Paul Otlet posited an idea in 1895 about "universal libraries" to give anyone access to a vast number of books. By 1934 he had refined it to "electronic telescopes" that would connect people instantly to books, films, audio recordings and photos.
