Back in the mid 80s, I owned a ZX Spectrum, which I upgraded with a floppy disk drive capable of storing a massive 180 kilobytes (!) on each disk.
I very quickly transferred my tape-based programs to a stack of floppies, but with all this available space, my imagination turned to other things. I decided to create an editable framework for storing encyclopaedic information on any subject (so I suppose I invented Wikipedia too, how about that?).
I wrote a disk-based, indexed database for storing pages of text, but quickly found the pages too plain to be easily readable - what was needed was a way of highlighting and formatting sections of text. I settled upon a system of control character sequences that would be wrapped around the text portion in question - the initial sequence would turn on the formatting, the one at the other end would turn it off.
But what I especially wanted to do was to be able to link - to allow the viewer to select any word and from there, go to a related page - either another one in the encyclopaedia, or just a dictionary definition.
Admittedly, my linking scheme didn’t specify a destination in the formatting tags - it just highlighted a word as being a link - the program would look up the actual destination in the index, then go there.
Of course, I do (now) realise that while I was doing this, the groundwork for real HTML was already being substantially laid, elsewhere in the world, by others more intelligent and capable than myself, but still - it’s interesting - because my work wasn’t derivative of anything I’d seen anywhere else. I invented it myself.
I still have the machine, the disk drive and probably the disks - although it hasn’t been powered up in many years - and storage in less than optimal conditions has probably wrecked the floppies - so I’m not sure I could ever prove any of the above, to any worthwhile extent - so if you feel like taking my honest word for it, there it is. If not, so be it.
My brother and I wrote a football managment simulator in the early ninties.
My match coding was streets ahead of any other similar game I’d seen (And I played a lot of sports management simulations). Much more realistic simulation of the actual too-and-fro of football.
I only stopped expanding and developing the game because my CPC464 ran out of memory.
Cool, do you want to be our (US) vice president? We had one once who almost but not really invented the internet.
I guess constitutionally you could be VPOTUS. You could perform all duties except for one, in the unfortunate event that the POTUS can’t perform his (or her) duties power would have to skip over you to the Secretary of State.
Who knows, you might even win an Oscar and a Nobel Peace Prize.
Yeah, remember the '80s? Back when we programmed with words instead of drags and clicks and stuff made more sense? Like filling in all those COBOL cells and nesting Case statements in Pascal? Oh yeah, good times. God, I feel old today.
Maybe… He was apparently already hard at work with it when I started, although I think I could have beaten him to publication and made him look like a big copycat. Oh well.
Just for those who think this is accurate, Al Gore never said this. What he actually said was “During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet.” It’s certainly arguable how accurate that is, but he did do quite a lot legislatively for computing and communications in the late '80s and early '90s.
Please stop saying that Al Gore claimed he invented the Internet, people. He never said it, and it belittles the influence he had in an area that, at the time, not many people knew about or thought was important.
I invented the concept of the derivative independently when I realized that the difference between consecutive perfect squares was always an odd number, and that if you take the differences in sequence you get the correct sequence of odd numbers. Of course, the difference between any two consecutive odd numbers is 2, a constant, so I also discovered that taking second and third derivatives is often somewhat dull.
Voyager: Don’t tell Vannevar Bush that, or he might go upside your head with a Memex.
