The Original Hyperlink

Interesting New York Times article on Paul Otlet, a librarian who in 1934 envisioned a network of interlinked documents using the analog technologies of the day -- index cards, telegraph machines, and the like -- in essence, a network of hyperlinks:

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.”

Historians typically trace the origins of the World Wide Web through a lineage of Anglo-American inventors like Vannevar Bush, Doug Engelbart and Ted Nelson. But more than half a century before Tim Berners-Lee released the first Web browser in 1991, Otlet (pronounced ot-LAY) described a networked world where “anyone in his armchair would be able to contemplate the whole of creation.”

Although Otlet’s proto-Web relied on a patchwork of analog technologies like index cards and telegraph machines, it nonetheless anticipated the hyperlinked structure of today’s Web. “This was a Steampunk version of hypertext,” said Kevin Kelly, former editor of Wired, who is writing a book about the future of technology.

Otlet’s vision hinged on the idea of a networked machine that joined documents using symbolic links. While that notion may seem obvious today, in 1934 it marked a conceptual breakthrough. “The hyperlink is one of the most underappreciated inventions of the last century,” Mr. Kelly said. “It will go down with radio in the pantheon of great inventions.”

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The article provides an intriguing look at the problems inherent in organizing and accessing large amounts of information, problems that have only grown over time. Modern technology makes it very easy to amass enormous quantities of data. Processing that data into information still results in oceans of information. Filtering, analyzing and abstracting that information into knowledge remains a task ill-suited to current computing technologies, and I suspect that extracting the pearls of wisdom contained within that base of knowledge may remain, perhaps forever, solely in the realm of the human mind's capabilities.