Now this guy had vision!

This gem comes via Bretton Vine that electronic bloodhound of eclectic digital media trivia!
Dave

The Web Time Forgot (login required)
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/17/science/17mund.html
By ALEX WRIGHT

MONS, Belgium — On a fog-drizzled Monday afternoon, this fading 
medieval city feels like a forgotten place. Apart from the 
obligatory Gothic cathedral, there is not much to see here except 
for a tiny storefront museum called the Mundaneum, tucked down a 
narrow street in the northeast corner of town. It feels like a 
fittingly secluded home  for the legacy of one of technology’s 
lost pioneers: Paul Otlet.View this photo


In 1934, Otlet sketched out plans for a global network of 
computers (or “electric telescopes,” as he called them) that would 
allow people to search and browse through millions of interlinked 
documents, images, audio and video files. He described how people 
would use the devices to send messages to one another, share files 
and even congregate in online social networks. He called the whole
thing a “réseau,” which might be translated as “network” 
— or arguably, “web.”

Historians typically trace the origins of the World Wide Web 
through a lineage of Anglo-American inventors like Vannevar Bush, 
Doug Engelbart and Ted Nelson. But more than half a century before 
Tim Berners-Lee released the first Web browser in 1991, Otlet 
(pronounced ot-LAY) described a networked world where “anyone in 
his armchair would be able to contemplate the whole of creation.”

Although Otlet’s proto-Web relied on a patchwork of analog  
technologies like index cards and telegraph machines, it 
nonetheless anticipated the hyperlinked structure of today’s Web. 
“This was a Steampunk version of hypertext,” said Kevin Kelly, 
former editor of  Wired, who is writing a book about the future 
of technology.
[...]