Roberto Busa, father of the Hypertext, dies at the age of 98

This might seem hyperbolic, and most people would first think of Ted Nelson and Tim Berners-Lee as the "founding fathers" of hypertext and the internet. But it is true that Father Busa, an Italian Jesuit priest and theology scholar, anticipated them in connecting the dots between informatics and the written word

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The goal was to use algorithmic processes for linguistic analysis in order to produce an index of the 1.5m lines (9m words in medieval Latin) of the complete works of Aquinas. At the time, no one thought that machines designed for numeric computations could be used for the study of written texts and linguistic concordances. The collaboration between Thomas Watson, founder of IBM, and Father Busa ushered a new era of humanities research. The result, the Index Thomisticus, has been available online since 2005.

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