Now we turn towards the pre-history of the World Wide Web, with maverick genius Ted Nelson’s early self published work on hypertext (when Tim Berners-Lee wrote the first protocol for the Web he was familiar with some of Nelson’s ideas), the even earlier and very famous “As We May Think” from Vannevar Bush, which is of interest not so much for all the predictions but for thinking about a machine that lets connections to be made between media things, and then the much more recent, populist, writing of David Weinberger who outlines some simple ways to think about the Web and how it has inverted what there was before. The Weinberger extract is long, but not difficult, but I’d read the other two first as these have both directly influenced the vision of those who first built the things that the Web is, and relies upon.

Extract from: Nelson, Theodor Holm. Literary Machines 91.1: The Report On, and Of, Project Xanadu Concerning Word Processing, Electronic Publishing, Hypertext, Thinkertoys, Tomorrow’s Intellectual Revolution, And Certain Other Topics Including Knowledge, Education and Freedom. Sausalito: Mindful Press, 1992. Print. (PDF)

Bush, Vannevar. “As We May Think.” The Atlantic July 1945. The Atlantic. Web. 19 July 2013. (PDF)

Extracts from: Weinberger, David. Small Pieces Loosely Joined: A Unified Theory of the Web. New York: Perseus Books, 2002. Print. (PDF)