Archive for the ‘Retro-Futurism’ Category

The Internet That Almost Was

Wednesday, July 14th, 2010

We get pretty cocky here in the 21st Century with our internets and World Wide Web Highway pages, but did you know that the idea for the Internet is four years older than Superman?

In the video above you can check out Belgium inventor Paul Otlet’s idea for a windowed display system that hooked up to other systems “over the telephone.” He also called word processing, a file system, and the multimedia CD-Rom craze all the way back in 1934.

How would the Internet be different today if we had made it then? Let us know your alternative Internet history in the comments!

Check out Paul Otlet’s Wikipedia page