The Lost Web
Link: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/17/science/17mund.html?8dpc=&_r=2&oref=slogin&pagewanted=print
Fifty years before Tim Berners-Lee released the first Web browser, an almost-forgotten Belgian inventor described a networked world, the Mundanaeum, where “anyone in his armchair would be able to contemplate the whole of creation.”
In 1934, Paul Otlet developed a scheme for a global network of "electric telescopes" that would give readers the power to browse through interlinked documents, images, as well as audio and video material, and to send messages to each other. He called the whole thing a “réseau,” which, as francophones know, is the word we use today for network.
The New York Times has an interesting article about Otlet, about the Mundaneum museum in Mons, and about a group of Otlet researchers and admirers who want Otlet's name added to the Pantheon of primarily Anglo-American WWW pioneers.
