Preconditions for the web
Is the web a necessary invention? Would it have come into existence even if the circumstances and events of the world had been different? Or could we today live in a world that doesn’t have a web if not for a few chance events?
Cost of producing information approaches zero
The modern conception of information itself seems like an inevitable phenomena. It begins with the Industrial Revolution. Up until this point information is rare, special and expensive. But big machines means mass reproduction of text and this parallels a growing secular literacy. Citizens and authorities have seen the power of the Bible on others. Pamphleteering mimics this, becomes political, social, and most of all accessible. It becomes possible for lay persons to imagine words as power, and that power within reach.
Rise of general purpose computing
Computation also begins to take hold at this time; again another inevitable trend. This is an outsized contributor to the Industrial Revolution but it won’t reach true fruition for centuries. I’d characterize this as not merely "words for people" but "words for machines". People like Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage begin to have deep insight into how mechanical processes can be tamed. Punchcards encode a grammar that automate entire classes of activity that previously required human minds to manage. Words no longer merely describe a process but actually perform a process. Words suddenly act on things other than humans. Subsequently people like Alan Turing build general purpose variations of such machines; inventing general purpose computation. Now computers have self modifying memory, and can do work at scale. This becomes the foundations that will both empower and bracket our thinking.
The Memex
Vannevar Bush seems to be the first person to take the idea of the power of information, an idea of mass reproduction, and an idea of general purpose computation and in the 1930's propose the Memex. A vision of all the worlds information at his fingertips, instantly accessible with rich hyperlinks between documents. In a sense his Oracle at Delphi is a conceit; that in simply having all the facts, that the answers naturally emerge. This is a motif we see over and over in the following years; an idea that conflates knowing with solving. To my mind this seems like a likely conception, but also one that was somewhat prescient at the time.
Hypertext
Another prescient early thinker and contributor is Ted Nelson with Project Xanadu. In the 1960s he proposed a "digital repository scheme for world-wide electronic publishing". His vision focuses more narrowly on the mechanics; on a human legible capability, transclusion and ownership. This work is somewhat under-appreciated but especially significant because his ideas seem to come out of a need to organize an overwhelming personal archival chaos that mirrors the larger disorder of the world. In solving his dilemma he solves the worlds. It’s also notable because it implies a universal namespace. The idea of being able to organize all documents in the universe in a way that they can reach each other.
It is also worth noting as with the Memex this is a device that augments human capabilities. Meant to be human read, not machine read, to be consumed, to be descriptive. The utility is in sense-making, in providing insight, instruction and guidance for humans specifically.
In my mind it’s less clear that this would have emerged if not for Ted Nelson.
Desktop
Douglas Engelbart then takes the vision painted by Vannevar and to some degree by Ted Nelson and builds "The Mother of All Demos"; inventing the mouse while he is at it. He invents what we think of as a modern computer.
One insight he brings is that humans reason spatially, and that a spatial desktop, where files and assets have a “place” is hugely helpful for human minds. By being able to “place” a non-physical file a human can build a kind of Mind Palace, to organize a wider realm of digital assets.
The rest of this story we know well, Steve Jobs goes to Xerox Parc and sees the work of Douglas Engelbart’s cohort. He scurries back to Apple and this directly translates to the device you are holding in your hand. These all seem like vaguely improbable events in hindsight but here we are.
The proto web era
At this point we’re still in a proto-web era.
Users are connecting to each other via dial up modems. FIDO net and BBS systems abound. The Internet as we know it is still in research labs, just one more network; and it supports some protocols: Gopher, Telnet, FTP. We see some larger machines emerging such as AOL, Prodigy, Compuserve, GEnie. But each of these networks is a separate universe with separate protocols, user bases and conversations although that’s soon about to change…