In late 1990, Tim Berners-Lee, a CERN computer scientist invented the World Wide Web (that you are currently using). The "Web" as it is affectionately called, was originally conceived and developed for the large high-energy physics collaborations which have a demand for instantaneous information sharing between physicists working in different universities and institutes all over the world. Now it has millions of academic and commercial users.

William (Bill) H. Gates is chairman and chief software architect of Microsoft Corporation, the worldwide leader in software, services and Internet technologies for personal and business computing. Microsoft had revenues of $25.3 billion for the fiscal year ending June 2001, and employs more than 40,000 people in 60 countries.

 

Vannevar Bush (Science Advisor to president Roosevelt during WW2) proposes Memex -- a conceptual machine that can store vast amounts of information, in which users have the ability to create information trails, links of related texts and illustrations, which can be stored and used for future reference.

Ted Nelson is presently a Research Fellow at the Sapporo HyperLab and Hokkaido University. He is a software designer, writer and film-maker who for thirty-five years has been pursuing the vision he had in 1960-- a world of universal digital media with a special logic structure, where all media objects can be quoted freely, seen side-by-side and connected side-by-side (transparallel viewing).