Above is what one early conception of the Internet looked like. It was called the "Mundaneum" (which sounds like a collection of Martin Amis's literary criticism) and it was invented by Paul Otlet (1868-1944), a Belgian lawyer who every so slightly missed the dotcom bubble and died hollow and penurious during World War II. According to the New York Times, Otlet started out with a cumbersome card catalog to store all the world's useless information, then anticipated a paperless network of "electric telescopes" that would archive "millions of interlinked documents, images, audio and video files." Oh, and he sort of invented the hyperlink, although his version had brains and sass:

Whereas links on the Web today serve as a kind of mute bond between documents, Otlet envisioned links that carried meaning by, for example, annotating if particular documents agreed or disagreed with each other. That facility is notably lacking in the dumb logic of modern hyperlinks.

Though the Mundaneum was shuttered after the Nazis invaded Belgium, a young grad student in the sixties discovered it and now it's a museum that no one ever visits (probably because the Wiki tells you all you need to know).

"The problem is that no one knows the story of the Mundaneum," said the lead archivist, Stéphanie Manfroid. "People are not necessarily excited to go see an archive. It's like, would you rather go see the latest ‘Star Wars' movie, or would you rather go see a giant card catalog?"

Card catalog!

More futurist over-reaching: The Telectroscope as early YouTube.

[New York Times]