The Mundaneum was an institution which aimed to gather together all the world’s knowledge and classify it according to a system called the Universal Decimal Classification. […]

[…] which eventually became an archive with more than 12 million index cards and documents.

Wow! …

When Nazi Germany invaded Belgium in 1940, the Mundaneum was replaced with an exhibit of Third Reich art, and some material was lost.

… sigh.

Prior to the shift to computers — where you typically have computer programmers designing data structures and such — my understanding is that a lot of people worked on designing filing systems for humans to use, which was somewhat analogous.

love reading this guy’s ideas for what would have been a steampunk internet