Wrong - In A Good Way...

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It's always nice to have one's preconceptions trashed and to learn something one should have known all along. In the last couple of days I've had my received knowledge about the history and development of modern computing/device paradigms so trashed. I always understood that what we have come to recognise as the ubiquitous Graphical User Interface of modern computers and devices - how we interact with them - had developed from ideas born at Xerox Parc, taken up by Steve Jobs at Apple, and made global by Microsoft (eventually) as Windows. Also that the concepts underlying the 'Internet' as we now perceive it to have had its conceptual inception with CERN and Tim Berners-Lee in the early '90's - alluded to by Apple's HyperCard team and Bill Atkinson, et al in the immediate years before [blog posts passim].

Not so. The basic concepts behind all of it were thrashed out in the 1950's: the idea of Hypertext - the fundamental plank of the World Wide Web and just about everything we do online today - was dreamt up before I was born, in the first years of that decade. Two names - and there are many more - need to be mentioned. To Doug Engelbart and Ted Nelson I give up a shout as future thinkers par excellence: not always acknowledged or even understood, but right there at the heart of all that we take for granted, and that the vast majority take as read, just like electricity or Apple Pay. I urge anyone even vaguely interested in how we got to where we are to dig into the history of it all. It's fascinating stuff...

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