“Hernando’s grandest ambition - to create a repository of all of the written knowledge of the world, searchable by key word, navigable through short summaries, and sortable by different criteria, all accessible from points widely dispersed in space - represents an extraordinary premonition of the world of the internet, the World Wide Web, search engines, and databases that was to emerge almost five centuries later.
“While Hernando’s efforts were astounding and his plans were a marvel of conception, the project he envisioned was in truth not possible without digitalization, the ability of machines to read and transcribe texts, and search algorithms that could be run through the Boolean logic of computers. When these technologies did become available, the information behemoth Google was able in the Google Books project to complete in a few short years much of the work that had been stalled in the five centuries since Hernando’s death…”
