PHL the 'birthplace' of the internet?
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
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