The Web That Wasn't


Google Tech TalksOctober, 23 2007ABSTRACT

For most of us who work on the Internet, the Web is all we have ever really known. It's almost impossible to imagine a world without browsers, URLs and HTTP. But in the years leading up to Tim Berners-Lee's world-changing invention, a few visionary information scientists were exploring alternative systems that often bore little resemblance to the Web as we know it today. In this presentation, author and information architect Alex Wright will explore the heritage of these almost-forgotten systems in search of promising ideas left by the historical wayside.

The presentation will focus on the pioneering work of Paul Otlet, Vannevar Bush, and Doug Engelbart, forebears of the 1960s and 1970s like Ted Nelson, Andries van Dam, and the Xerox PARC team, and more recent forays like Brown's Intermedia system. We'll trace the heritage of these systems and the solutions they suggest to present day Web quandaries, in hopes of finding clues to the future in the recent technological past.

Speaker: Alex Wright
Alex Wright is an information architect at the New York Times and the author of Glut: Mastering Information Through the Ages. Previously, Alex has led projects for The Long NowFoundation, California Digital Library, Harvard University, IBM, Microsoft, Rollyo and Sun Microsystems, among others. He maintains a personal Web site at http://...







Channel: People
Uploaded: October 26, 2007 at 9:12 am
Author: googletechtalks

Length: 00:59:34
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Video Comments:
nicegurl112 (October 17, 2008 at 4:47 pm)
anyway, tick tock tick tock,i want some johnson.
Valetudo21 (October 10, 2008 at 3:49 am)
great talk. VERY interesting!
F00dTube (September 9, 2008 at 10:38 pm)
Yea! And did you know that the wtc towers fell faster than free fall?
vaundawg (September 8, 2008 at 5:54 am)
boxa, tesla was opposed to einsteins theory of relativity and was obsessed with refuting it. he refused to acnowledge even that space might be curved - something we observe frequently now and even rely on to determine the locations of distant heavenly bodies. his theory of how something could move faster than light has been disproven several times over. it's pseudoscience. sorry.

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