History Of The World Wide Web

The history of the web can be thought to have begun in 1945 with an essay written by Vannevar Bush, an American inventor and scientific administrator. In the article, titled “As We May Think,” he argued that scientific efforts following World War II should concentrate on the collection and preservation of human knowledge (Jones, 2006), describing a system “for storing information based on associations.” Bush even devised a photo-electrical mechanical device named Memex, short for memory extension, which would be able to “make and follow links between documents on microfiche” (W3C, 2004). While the Memex project would prove to be too ambitious to enter into production, the notion of a pool of collective cross referenced human knowledge would prove to be highly influential to the work of others, such as that of Ted Nelson and Douglas Englebart, who would further Bush’s vision with their own work. In 1960 American sociologist and information technology pioneer Ted Nelson devised a means of linking related documents with a simple user interface, which became Project Xanadu and coined the term “Hypertext” in 1963 to describe this concept.