The Proceedings of the Athanasius Kircher Society turns up another forgotten gem: the work of Paul Otlet and his Mundaneum. The forerunner of the World Wide Web – but built on index cards. I’ve just one quibble with the article in the Proceedings – it mistakenly confuses the Internet with the World Wide Web. It’s a common enough mistake, but it’s completely wrong to confuse the two, and it irritates the hell out of a pedant like me. Still, the article is worth reading, and particularly the referenced article from Boxes and Arrows.
The Mundaneum
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4 responses to “The Mundaneum”
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umm… give us your version of the diff geoff? I think I have it right but just in case….
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OK, the Internet is simply an infrastructure, upon which higher level applications, such as the Web, run. The Internet’s function is to transport bits of information from one place to another in a reliable manner. That’s all it does.
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I’m having a little difficulty with the difference of the two concepts. Apologies for being stupid. From what (little) i understand: The internet is the system which transports the information, say, the index cards of Otlet’s Mundaneum, while the World Wide Web is the information carried through this system, i.e. the writing on these cards. Is that right?
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Not quite… The web is not "the information", it is the manner in which the information is packaged. A sort of analogy (it’s not perfect, but it may do to begin with) is to think of the Internet as the road infrastructure, with its highways, byways, rules and signage. Then you could envisage the web as being public transport (buses, coaches), carrying information to people. Roads also carry other forms of transport – e.g. mail wagons (email), heavy goods (FTP), and so on…
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