In 1940 President Roosevelt's science adviser, Vannevar Bush, appointed Loomis to head the top-secret "Rad Lab" at MIT.

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He then went on to speculate as to what Vannevar Bush had wrought.

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Dr Decker said the promise of the semantic web had spurred visionaries such as Vannevar Bush, Doug Engelbart and Tim Berners-Lee.

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They fit the vision famously laid out by Vannevar Bush in a 1945 Atlantic Monthly article describing his Memex system.

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Vannevar Bush wrote a great paper about how it could be done.

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Vannevar Bush died long before the launch of Forbes.com, but he built analog computers in the 1920s and described a mechanism that anticipated hypertext and the Internet in the 1940s.

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Before he died (and before the first ignition in New Mexico), he wrote a letter to Vannevar Bush, director of the wartime Office of Scientific Research and Development, which oversaw building of the atomic bombs.

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The same question undoubtedly arose 80 years ago as Vannevar Bush and Karl Taylor Compton at MIT foresaw that the use of national resources to fund science and technology research could change the course of warfare.

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