Ahead of its time?
Vannevar Bush was thinking along the lines of hypertext before the necessary technology for actually implementing it was available. Bush wasn't necessarily the first person to think along these lines. A favorite etching from the renaissance period suggests that others were thinking along similar lines even a great deal earlier:
The trick is to be in the right place at the right time. CBS almost did that.
It was on this day, in 1951, that CBS began broadcasting television programs in color. The only problem was that at the time there weren't any color televisions available to see those programs in color, other than the televisions in research laboratories.
CBS continued color broadcasts for four months, until October of 1951. Various problems came up, not the least of which was that advertisers weren't buying advertising time. It turns out that the standard for color broadcasting was totally incompatible with the monochrome machines on the market, so viewers at home weren't seeing the color programs in black and white, but instead weren't seeing them at all. From the point of view of the advertisers, buying air time for ads that nobody was going to see didn't really make much sense.
Color television broadcasting "as we know it" began in late 1953 or the beginning of 1954, after the Federal Communications Commission adopted a color television standard in December of 1953. Marketing of color televisions began in March of 1954. The rest, of course, is history, some of which can be found here, or here, or here.
Go to: The Church of the Eternal Click.