Eric Drexlers classic on nanotechnology: "engines of creation"

e-drexler.com

2 pointsmixmax2 comments

Eric Drexlers classical book on nanotechnology.

Besides, of course, nanotechnology it also, as aswanson pointed out in a comment, describes the idea of the world wide web, forums, advertising and pagerank, in 1986, 4 years before Tim Berners Lee launched the world wide web.

If you haven't read you should.

A better reference for the non-nanotech stuff you mention is his "Hypertext Publishing and the Evolution of Knowledge"[1] (which clearly cites the prior work of Bush in 1945 and Nelson in 1978).

Discussion forums as we know them today have been around since about 1978 and ad-supported publishing predates the 1800's.

I can't seem to find any specific mention of what we today know as pagerank (i.e. the cumulative probability that a given user will arrive at a given page) at all in either work.

[1] http://www.e-drexler.com/d/06/00/Hypertext/HPEK1.html

Reply on news.ycombinator.com