History of Hypermedia
Hypertext | Hypertext Systems | Hypermedia

Vannevar Bush, Memex, Leibniz, Babbage, Engelbart, SRI, Mouse, Xanadu, Intermedia, ZOG, Xerox Parc, NoteCards, HyperTies, Guide

Memex Machine

Vannevar Bush proposed a machine called the Memex, which he described as:

"a device in which an individual stores his books, records and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility".

In his article "As We May Think", Atlantic Monthly, July, 1945, Bush referred to Leibniz and to Babbage, both of whom designed sophisticated calculating machines which could not be constructed during their lifetimes. He then went on to envision this Memex machine as a combination of two (at that time) emerging technologies - micro photography and electrical logic. Bush then turned his attention to the methods that a Memex would automate:

"Our ineptitude in getting at the record is largely caused by the artificiality of systems. When data of any sort are placed in storage, they are filed alphabetically or numerically, and information is found (when it is) by tracing it down from subclass to subclass. It can only be in one place, unless duplicates are used; one has to have rules as to which path will locate it, and the rules are cumbersome. Having found one item, moreover, one has to emerge from the system and reenter on a new path. The human mind does not work that way. It operates by association. With one item in its grasp, it snaps instantly to the next that is suggested by the association of thoughts, in accordance with some intricate web of trails carried by the cells of the brain."

He then envisions the mechanization of this process where the user will add his own trails to the material on the Memex:

"When the user is building a trail, he names it ... Before him are the two items to be joined, projected onto adjacent viewing positions ... The user taps a single key, and the items are permanently joined .... Thereafter, at any time, when one of these items is in view, the other can be instantly recalled merely by tapping a button."

Bush's foresight in the 1940s made dramatic reading in the 1980's when it was republished as the opening article of CD/ROM The New Papyrus, the first major reference work of the optical disk publishing industry. It is perhaps ironic to note that, like Leibniz and Babbage before him, Bush also did not live to see the machine he had envisioned.

Stanford Research Institute - NLS

At the end of the summer of 1945, a 20-year-old American serviceman, Doug Engelbart, came across Bush's article in a Red Cross library in the Philippines. Engelbart found that the ideas expressed in "As We May Think" were to dominate the rest of his life. He went on, during the 1950s and 1960s, to lead the most extraordinary work in developing and implementing many of the fundamental concepts that we now take for granted in the personal computing industry.

This work at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) led to the development of the NLS (on line system), by SRI in the Augmented Human Intellect Research Center.

NLS allowed users to create electronic documents based on connected concepts, to build hierarchies of information and to collaborate with others on the joint development of documentation. The work was also responsible for the development of many features which we now recognize as standard in modern personal computer systems: text processing and electronic mail, multi document screen displays and interactive control by the user of a computer system.

In a paper in 1963, Engelbart introduced, among other things, the pointing device that became the first computer mouse:

"As an auxiliary device, there is a gadget that is held like a pencil and instead of a point, has a special sensing mechanism which can be moved ... permits you to sweep the reading stylus over the characters much faster than the writer can type ...The hypothetical writing machine thus permits you to use a new process of composing text. For instance, trial drafts can rapidly be composed from rearranged excerpts or old drafts, together with new words or passages which you insert by hand typing."

At the Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco in December 1968 Engelbart demonstrated NLS for the first time in public. The system was primarily hierarchical, reflecting the structure of most technical documentation, but it allowed reference links to be established between levels and between files. NLS could also be used by more than one person working jointly on the same document. Each user operated a separate mouse pointing device and could pass the pointer or "electronic chalk" from one to the other to indicate points of discussion.

By all accounts this demonstration was incredible. It is recalled in detail in Howard Rheingold's book Tools for Thought.

"Those who were in the audience at the Civic Auditorium that afternoon remember how Doug's quiet voice managed to gently but irresistibly seize the attention of several thousand high-level hackers and engineers for nearly two hours. After which the audience did something rare in that particularly competitive and critical subculture - they gave Doug and his colleagues a standing ovation."

NLS was commercialized by McDonnell Douglas as the Augment system, but the hardware required to operate the system was too expensive for normal commercial use and it did not succeed as a product. It was many years later than 1968 before most people, even in the computer industry, began to regard computers as primarily machines for the management of text.

Xanadu

Ted Nelson's hypertext project is called Xanadu. Surely it is the most ambitious hypertext project of all. Xanadu is concerned with the construction of a hypertext server which will allow all the world's literature to be linked up and made available to the user of a computer terminal.

The access routes, display mechanisms, and protocols are to be provided by other vendors (the 'Front-Ends') with Xanadu providing the "BackEnd" functions. After more than twenty years as a loosely organized cooperative, Xanadu became a commercial project, being developed by Autodesk Inc.

Ted Nelson is one of the most inspiring and charismatic individuals in the computer industry. He describes enthusiastically his dream of a future wired world where, on driving along the freeway at night you might come across a tall tower with an illuminated 'X' sign on top. This sign indicates a Xanadu station and when you pull in you will be able to access, for a small fee, any information you want to, from the complete corpus of all published information anywhere in the world.

Intermedia

Brown University's Intermedia is the descendant of an early hypertext project called FRESS by Ted Nelson and Andy Van Dam during the late 1960s and 1970s. The Institute for Research in Information and Scholarship (IRIS) at Brown University has developed hypertext systems for a variety of courses, including English Literature.

Intermedia documents are rich in display features, showing both text and graphics together in scrollable document windows. A notable feature of Intermedia is the web which displays a set of links between hypertext documents and can be used in order to provide a model of the information paths, similar to Engelbart's trails, through the documents.

Typically a tutor will set up recommended paths in the hypertext course material, to which students will add their own links and annotations. Intermedia runs on the Apple UNIX operating system and is now available commercially. At present, it is mainly used as a research environment at IRIS, where courses are taught - making use of the system and the hypertexts created with it. It is still being extended for other media, and new facilities.

ZOG

Carnegie-Mellon's ZOG was a research project for much of the 1970s. A commercial product, KMS, was derived from this work and was marketed by Knowledge Systems Inc. to run on SUN and other workstations. In the early 1980s, it was applied to an information management project on the USS Carl Vinson, the largest aircraft carrier in the world.

KMS has been designed for managing large hypertexts, and to work across local area networks. All the information is displayed in fixed sized windows (called frames), which fill most of the screen of a graphics workstation. Links to other documents are indicated by a small icon at the start of a section of text. Dynamic feedback is provided by a changing drop down button menu which indicates the functions available at each link in the system.

Notecards

Xerox PARC's Notecards is a system developed on powerful Xerox Lisp workstations at the corporation's Palo Alto Research Center to support researchers at PARC in developing their ideas, communicating with each other and eventually publishing their results as printed documents.

Notecards provided an environment in which the electronic equivalent of 3 inch by 5 inch note cards could be created to contain both text and graphics, and hypertext links could be created between the individual cards. A typical Notecards display would show several cards on the screen at once.

Notecards also provided two generic navigation card types: the browser card which was generated by the system and showed a map of the links between a set of cards, and the filebox card which could be used to categorize and collect related cards.

HyperTies

HyperTies (1983) was developed at the University of Maryland to allow people to interact with on screen information in a simple manner. The system was successful, but the authoring environment got very complex for large documents and the layout only provided text on separate non scrolling screens. Graphics could also be displayed. Because the system was commercially available on the PC, came with a demo and a book by its creator, it became very well known.

Guide

Guide was begun in 1982 by Professor Peter Brown at the Computing Laboratory of the University of Kent at Canterbury. The goals of the project were to develop electronic documents which users would prefer to paper ones. Guide set out not to imitate pieces of paper or cards, but instead to offer the user an active electronic model of a document, allowing the opportunity to interact directly with it in order to navigate and browse through the information.

The basic structure of Guide was the expansion button, a section which was replaced when selected, with an expansion to provide additional levels of detail. This mechanism allowed the user, whether they were an author or a reader, to expand and contract a document, viewing the desired level at any time.

Guide was further developed by Office Workstations Limited (OWL), with the addition of complex graphics, multiple font selection and, most significantly, reference link buttons. Reference buttons allowed the reader to quickly navigate around sections of a document and to automatically call up other, related, documents.

Guide also allows for the creation of "nonsticky" pop-up windows, activated by note buttons.

Guide was extended to incorporate two additional important features. One was a launcher capability that allowed an author to launch other applications such as spreadsheets, data bases, any other executable programs. Information and instructional processes could be integrated with Guide in this way. Second, a Pascal like programming language was fully integrated into Guide. This allowed authors to program administrative tasks such as student tracking, test administration, data collection or whatever. Guide command buttons activate the launcher and programmed scripts.

Guide received the British Computer Society Award for Technology in 1988, and the University of Kent has continued development of a Unix based version of the program.

Versions of Guide for both the Apple Macintosh and the IBM Personal Computer were first offered for sale in the United States in August 1986. This product could display multiple scrollable documents containing high quality text and graphics and is now very widely used for hypertext application development. When Apple Computer released its version of HyperCard, OWL stopped selling and supporting its Macintosh version of Guide, focusing solely on the IBM PC platform, and Windows, in particular.

Guide is the Hyper Media authoring system Dr. Stelzer used to create his WORLD RELIGION CD-ROM, ALL ABOUT HERBS CD-ROM, and his PHILOSOPHY CD-ROM. This document about the History of Hypermedia was created in Guide, and ported to Microsoft Word for printing. It was ported again to a Macintosh platform, converted to HTML and uploaded to HYPER LINK's World Wide Web site for viewing over the Internet.