Who is the father of hypertext?

If you answered 'Tim Berners Lee' you are so wrong!

Who is the father of hypertext?

If you answered 'Tim Berners Lee' you are so wrong!

But many now agree that Vannevar Bush, who was born on March 11 1890, is the true father of hypertext.

Way back in 1945, he wrote an article in The Atlantic Monthly called 'As We May Think' and in this article he discussed a futuristic device he called a Memex that could display books and document from a library and this sounds suspiciously like the Web, doesn't it?

More importantly, Bush said that the Memex would also be able to create 'trails' of linked and branching sets of pages and if this is not a precursor to hypertext, we don't know what is.

Bush was the person who inspired Ted Nelson, the creator of hypertext and also of Douglas Engelbart, who invented the computer mouse. In short, if you are using a mouse to browse the Web, you should understand that neither would have been possible without Bush.

Of course, you may want to call Bush a genius of sorts, but you would only be half right. He also, like all of us, made mistakes. In fact, the Jargon File has a rather nasty meaning for 'vannevar' and describes it as 'A bogus technological prediction or a foredoomed engineering concept, especially one that fails by implicitly assuming that technologies develop linearly, incrementally, and in isolation from one another when in fact the learning curve tends to be highly nonlinear, revolutions are common, and competition is the rule.'

The man behind this unflowery description is also Vannevar Bush, who predicted about 'electronic brains' and said that they would be the size of the Empire State Building with a Niagara-Falls-equivalent cooling system for their tubes and relays. This never happened because semiconductor technology caused component sizes to shrink.

But all said and done, Vannevar Bush is well respected and even has the Vannevar Bush Award to his name, which recognises individuals who make an outstanding contribution toward the welfare of mankind through science and technology. Instituted by the National Science Board in 1980, the winners include David Packard, co-founder of Hewlett-Packard, Linus Pauling, who one of only four individuals to have won multiple Nobel Prizes and the only one to win two in unrelated fields.

In an interesting Indian connection, the 2006 award was given to Charles Townes and Dabbala Rajagopal 'Raj' Reddy. The latter, who hails from AP, is one of the early pioneers in computer science and artificial intelligence and was the founding director of the Robotics Institute and the dean of the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University.

"Exciting news! Mid-day is now on WhatsApp Channels