On a Monday afternoon wet with fog, this fading medieval city feels forgotten. Apart from the Gothic cathedral, there is not much to see here, except for a tiny storefront museum called the Mundaneum, on a narrow street in the northeast corner of town. It feels like a fittingly secluded home for the legacy of one of technology’s lost pioneers: Paul Otlet.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,” or network.Historians 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 described a networked world where “anyone in his armchair would be able to contemplate the whole of creation.”
http://iht.com/articles/2008/06/17/technology/WEB.php
http://nytimes.com/2008/06/17/science/17mund.html