The Web happened because of the history of microprocessors and telecommunications and wartime industry and commercial requirements, and a bunch of different discoveries and patents and corporate research funds and academic papers and TBL’s own family history; but it also happened because it was Web Time: for a brief moment, the dispositions of culture and technology converged on an invention that, in hindsight, was predicted by everything from ancient Chinese encyclopaedias to microfilm retrieval to the stories of Jorge Luis Borges. The Web was necessary, and so it appeared – in this timeline,
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