Today marks the birthday of Vannevar Bush (1890-1974), the "grandfather of hypertext." During World War II he was the head of the U. S. Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD), which coordinated all sorts of projects to develop technology and weapons (including the Manhattan Project). Around 1945, Bush conceived the "encyclopedia of the future" as having a mesh (or web) of documents with associative trails running through it. His original design was built around an assembly of interconnected microfilm readers with sophisticated cross referencing. (A tag in the text on one slide of a microfilm reel could be used to trigger another microfilm reader to retrieve a page in a different document, and so on.) Useful development of this idea took about 40 years. The first computer file-linking program was Apple’s Filevision, in 1984, followed by “HyperCard” in 1987. The languages that create all of the linking in the Web -- Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) and Hypertext Transfer Protocol (http://) -- are 31 years old this year. My tie shows many elements of the "gibberish" that shows up in HTML coding for the Web links we use constantly to navigate through our "encylopedia" of universal knowledge. One of my cloth masks for this pandemic is covered with a web of linked nodes.
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