In just 15 years, the World Wide Web has gone through many iterations: document-sharing tool for researchers, key source of news and information, shopping mecca, multimedia playground, and incredibly popular means of socializing and self-expression. How did the Web get so far so fast?

Well, it didn't, exactly. As with many inventions, to understand how today's Web developed, you have to look a lot further back than its official introduction. The seeds of the Web were planted much earlier than 1991.

Amazingly, an early version of the Web was floating around in at least one person's head way back during World War II. In an essay titled "As We May Think" that appeared in The Atlantic Monthly in 1945, Vannevar Bush, an American engineer and scientific administrator, argued that as society emerged from World War II, our scientific efforts should become centered on preserving and collecting all previous human knowledge.

Of Time And The Web

To collect and display all this information, Bush even devised a system he named Memex. A combination of broadcast television and microfilm, in theory this device would allow researchers to rapidly access microfilm from remote locations as well as quickly link from one microfilm version of a book to a related topic in another via electromagnetic means.

Memex was a far cry from the notion of hypertext--computers in the 1940s lacked any sort of visual element beyond the punch card--but Bush's theory that humans should pool their knowledge for quick reference and cross-reference proved eerily accurate.

Bush was ahead of his time: Memex proved too complicated and ambitious to make it into production. But his theories proved highly influential to Ted Nelson, a sociologist and IT pioneer who devised a digitally oriented theory of information architecture, and to Douglas Englebart, a research engineer credited with the invention of the computer mouse.

In 1960, Nelson dreamed up a notion of dynamically linking documents with a simple user interface. This theory became Project Xanadu and marks the first-known usage of the word "hypertext." Unfortunately, implementing a system using Nelson's concept of hypertext in Project Xanadu proved too complex. So, like Bush before him, Nelson wasn't able to see his vision come to fruition.

At almost the same time Nelson was developing his theories, Englebart, an American inventor, was putting them into action. He echoed both Bush's and Nelson's beliefs that technology and information had a strong influence on each other. His 1962 paper, "Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework" posited a computerized network of information.

In 1963, Englebart set about turning his theories into reality. He set up the futuristic-sounding Augmentation Research Center. There he created the first successful implementation of hypertext and the early underpinnings of the graphical user interface. Just as important, he created a device that let users browse and click through the interface and information: the computer mouse.

In a 1968 presentation of the technology at the Fall Joint Computer Conference (it included a live videoconference with his lab 30 miles away), Englebart gave what has since been referred to as "the mother of all demos." The notion of a graphical user interface, hypertext, and mouse-driven interface was so far ahead of its time that some members of the audience thought he was pulling off an elaborate hoax.

The impact of these concepts was revolutionary, even if it took several years for technology to catch up. Nelson's and Englebart's ideas eventually played a key role in the machinations and theories of Tim Berners- Lee, who would go on to invent the World Wide Web.