...the idea of internet

PHL the 'birthplace' of the internet?

July 11, 2013

 

 

 

The Philippines may have played a much more important role with regard to the Internet as we know it today other than being a mere .ph suffix in a Web address.

Douglas Engelbart, who died earlier this year, invented the mouse and devised an online setup to remotely fetch information—after he read an article in the Philippines.

Engelbart was a Navy technician when he read a 1945 article published at The Atlantic, "As We May Think," by mid-century science icon Vannevar Bush, The Atlantic reported.

Bush's essay had described the Memex, an information-retrieval system, where every "book, record, or communication" was microfilmed and catalogued.

The essay was published in LIFE magazine, a copy of which ended up in a Red Cross library in —guess where—Leyte.

Idea born in Leyte

Engelbart, then a Navy radar technician, never saw combat in World War II, as the war ended just as his boat left San Francisco Bay on its way to the Philippines.

It was in Leyte that Engelbart "stumbled across a Red Cross reading library in a native hut set on stilts, complete with thatched roof and plentiful bamboo," The Atlantic said.

"The ideas in the story plowed new intellectual terrain for Engelbart, and the seeds that he planted and nurtured there over the next twenty years grew, with the help of millions of others, into the Internet you see today," it added.

Engelbart eventually wrote Bush a letter describing how profoundly Bush's work affected him.

"I might add that this article of yours has probably influenced me quite basically. I remember finding it and avidly reading it in a Red Cross library on the edge of the jungle on Leyte, one of the Philippine Islands, in the fall of 1945," he wrote.

"I rediscovered your article about three years ago, and was rather startled to realized how much I had aligned my sights along the vector you had described. I wouldn't be surprised at all if the reading of this article sixteen and a half years ago hadn't had a real influence on my thoughts and actions," he added.

Obits

Engelbart had been lauded by the Los Angeles Times' obituary as the one whose work "inspired generations of scientists, demonstrated in the 1960s what could happen when computers talk to one another."

For his part, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak credited Engelbart's 1960s research "for everything we have in the way computers work today."

"So, in one tangible and real sense, the Internet we know now began in that hut across the world. As Bush made new thoughts possible for Engelbart, Engelbart made it possible for us to imagine the rest of it," The Atlantic said. — VC, GMA News