it's Vannevar Bush.
Wow. I never thought I'd stick up for someone from that family... perhaps Dubya should tell Al that his great-uncle beat him to the punch on the whole 'invented the Internet' thing?
(Vannevar Bush, a noted MIT research scientist and engineer, was George Sr.'s uncle - or maybe it was cousin, I forget offhand. Anyway, Bush's 1945 article "As We May Think" has been cited by nearly all of the early hypertext pioneers as a seminal influence on their designs. He designed the first vocoder, and an analog computer called the Differential Analyser, and was Cluade Shannon's graduate advisor. He also served as the director of Office of Scientific Research and Development during WWII, and had a key role in the formation of the Manhattan Project. Those with suspicious mind might find this factoid interesting, as well as the fact that many UFOlogists claim he was he one behind the 'Roswell coverup'.)
Aside for Bush and Bremer, there are several others with cliams at least as good as theirs throughout to 1960s and 1970s - hell, Nelson gave hypertext its name in 1965! Engelbart developed the idea extensively from 1962 to 1973 (his famous ACM Joint Conference demonstration of AUGMENT - and the original mouse - was in 1968), and Kay's Smalltalk/Dynabook system had hypertextual aspects from the beginning, while hypertext browsing systems were developed at Brown, Carnegie-Mellon, and Stanford in the period of 1968-1970.
By 1976, the idea of hypertext was well established, at least among researchers. The US Air force and Navy were already beginning to use hypermedia for indexing technical references by then, as well. And, as one final nail in the coffin, the original Computer Lib, one of the first popular (in the sense of for the non-computer user) computer books, had a full writeup on the subject fully two years earlier. |
