Who said this? ” …. to make the world’s information universally accessible and useful”. When was it said and who said it? Tim Berners-Lee? Vannevar Bush? Yahoo? Google? Microsoft?
No, try an early 19th century politico.
Just a little gem from the first of the new series of the BBC’s The Long View (28 Feb 2006) which had the title [i]The 19th century Information Highway[/i]. I can find no archive for this series, so we can but hope that this one doesn’t disappear into the ether.
The BBC appears a bit inconsisent with its archives with some programmes having extensive ones going back several years and others, like this one, apparently having none. Anyway, in case this programme site disappears the programme considered Henry Brougham who set up the:
{quote}
Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge – which harnessed the latest in steam press technology – he sought to spread knowledge to every corner of the kingdom. But just as today, Brougham ran into controversy – criticised on both sides for the degree of control he had over the flow of information. And his Utopian dreams – that knowledge could transform society – never came to fruition. Will today’s search engine visionaries meet the same fate?
{end quote}
Oh, and Vannevar Bush? His seminal As We May Think is still worth a read, predating in vision, if not in implementation, the Web as given life many decades later by Tim Berners-Lee.
