When Professor Georges Anderla, as a consultant to the OECD in the early 1970s, asserted that the nascent knowledge industry would matter as much or more than manufacturing or energy, his peers labelled the metaphor an inflated rhetoric. Yet already, momentous developments were taking shape in which Anderla was to play a proactive part. First, the National Science Foundation of the US endorsed his forecasting study and implemented the project of information technology indicators, published annually. The European Commission then created a tailor-made directorate for information management. In that capacity, Anderla conceptualised - and negotiated the status of - a trans-European data transmission network, code-named Euronet, a forerunner of the US-sponsored Internet. Anderla fostered cognitive sciences, in particular, computer-aided translation, and galvanised the growth of a web of interactive databases, by so doing, prodding European researchers and policy-makers to face up to...