The Internet Before the Internet: Paul Otlet’s Mundaneum (2016)

>More than a century ago, Belgian information activist Paul Otlet envisioned a universal compilation of knowledge and the technology to make it globally available. He foresaw, in other words, some of the possibilities of today’s Web.

No, he foresaw some universal compilation of knowledge, which is absolutely not the web.

But actually as the article explains, he was involved in the cataloging of books, and making the catalogs available via remote means. This development is significant in its own way and I think is diminished by a bogus click-bait comparison to the Internet and the web.

I know there have been previous threads but they're not so easy to find, because they usually get unspecific titles like "a guy who anticipated the internet a century ago". I found:

2009: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=988008

2015: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9783046

2015: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10104269

Anyone want to look for others? Please link to submissions that got comments, since that's why users click.