It is well known that Time Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau should both be credited with the “invention” of the Internet. Together they proposed to fund a project about interlinked documentation, which led to what we now know as the Internet, and Cailliau wrote the first web browser for the Mac, called MacWWW.
Robert Cailliau is the best known Belgian in the history of the Internet, but he is not the first one. In the late nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century, several people were thinking about information storage and retrieval: Vannevar Bush, of course, but also people like Paul Otlet, Emanuel Goldberg, and even H.G.Wells. Paul Otlet, another Belgian citizen, turns out to have been quite visionary. ‘The Atlantic’ tells “The Secret History of Hypertext” and writes:
Otlet saw the network as essential to his vision of a worldwide platform for knowledge sharing; Bush envisioned the Memex as a stand-alone machine. For all his remarkable prescience, Bush never predicted anything like the Internet. That credit rightly goes to Otlet.
There are a lot of calls for “innovation” in the air in Belgium these days;. Based on what I have read, you could say that we haven’t done that bad in the past – we just have to keep up the good i-work today and in the future ;-)
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