The secret history of hypertext

Historians of technology often cite Bush’s essay as the conceptual forerunner of the Web. And hypertext pioneers like Douglas Engelbart, Ted Nelson, and Tim Berners-Lee have all acknowledged their debt to Bush’s vision. But for all his lasting influence, Bush was not the first person to imagine something like the Web.

This actually reminds me a lot of how contemporary technology media look at smartphones and such. They often have little to no experience with the breadth of mobile technology that came before the iPhone and Android, and as a consequence, they treat everything as new, revolutionary, and ‘owned’ – even though virtually everything has been taken from somewhere else.

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