Learning HTTP/2

Chapter 1. The Evolution of HTTP

In the 1930s, Vannevar Bush, an electrical engineer from the United States then at MIT’s School of Engineering, had a concern with the volume of information people were producing relative to society’s ability to consume that information. In his essay published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1945 entitled, “As We May Think,” he said:

Professionally our methods of transmitting and reviewing the results of research are generations old and by now are totally inadequate for their purpose. If the aggregate time spent in writing scholarly works and in reading them could be evaluated, the ratio between these amounts of time might well be startling.

He envisioned a system where our aggregate knowledge was stored on microfilm and could be “consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility.” He further stated that this information should have contextual associations with related topics, much in the way the human mind links data together. His memex system was never built, but the ideas influenced those that followed.

The term Hypertext that we take for granted today was coined around 1963 and first published in 1965 by Ted Nelson, a software designer and visionary. He proposed the concept of hypertext to mean:

…a body of written or pictorial material interconnected in such a complex way that it could not conveniently be presented or represented on paper. It may contain summaries, or maps of its contents and their interrelations; it may contain annotations, additions ...