Book People Archive

Re: !@[redacted] Re: Early ebook history info wanted; "Alice"; Brown Corpus; Vannevar Bush; Asimov 

> I think I was definitely the first person to put something in a
> computer that was designed to become the first step of eLibraries.

If you read Doug Engelbart's work from 1962 and 1968 (online at
www.bootstrap.org), he was all over this idea from the beginning.  And
there's Nelson and van Dam's work on HES and FRESS at Brown in 1968
and 1969.

> I seriously doubt if anyone tried to put something permanent on
> the Net before July 4, 1971.

The first Internet IMP was at UCLA (Kleinrock's group on network
measurement), and the second (the first to have anyone else to talk
to) was at Engelbart's lab at SRI, who connected up their NLS
hypertext publishing system.  This was in 1969.  They fully expected
it to be permanent.  And since at least one of the 1968 reports
originally published on NLS is still on the Web, it certainly has
lifetime.  Unless UCLA got there first, Engelbart's group was
certainly the first to put designed-for-humans documents up on the
Internet.

> I told people that computers would be used more for exchange
> of information than for computing sub-orbital trajectories,
> and they thot I was nuts.

There was a huge group there at UIUC (oddly enough, at CERL)
throughout the 60's and 70's working on PLATO, working on systems to
use computers for teaching (funded by Army dollars).

Bill