0.2 Three special events in the history of technology for creating  (Page 6/12)

Hypertext and the world wide web

The most remarkable species of book to punctuate the equilibrium of the twentieth century was the entirelynew literary form of hypertext. [Kilgour, p. 155]

The modern concept of hypertext seems to have originated with the 1945 Atlantic Monthly article by Vannevar Bush, who used his ideas of how the mind works “by associations” topropose the memex , a forerunner to linked hypertext.

In the early 1960s, after reading Bush’s article, Douglas Engelbart started the Augmentation Research Center(ARC) at the Stanford Research Institute. The ARC used a precursor of hypertext in what it called the On-Line System . Engelbart talked about asynchronous collaboration among teams distributedgeographically, about the use of computers to augment human intellect, and about the idea of “bootstrapping” as an iterativeand coadaptive learning processes or a feedback system. All of these ideas show up in Connexions , to be described later.

The actual term, “hypertext,” was coined around 1965 by Ted Nelson, who developed the idea in a complexsystem he called Xanadu.

By “hypertext,” I mean non-sequential writing–text that branches and allows choices to the reader, bestread at an interactive screen. As popularly conceived, this is a series of text chunks connected by links which offer the readerdifferent pathways. [Nelson 1965]

A form of hypertext has come into common use on the Internet and World Wide Web (WWW) with the hypertext markuplanguage (HTML), the hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP), and the browser, Mosaic , which evolved into the familiar Firefox, Netscape, Internet Explorer , and other browsers. HTML enables the linking of a point in a text to another point in that text or another text.This linking is created by the author to allow a new control by the reader.

This system, which breaks up the usual linear or sequential structure of the traditional book so that readers caneasily branch to related topics, may be more compatible with the way people think and learn (that is what Bush and Engelbart had inmind). The traditional book tries to bring this ability with the use of page references, footnotes, endnotes, sidebars, and otherprint techniques. The table of contents and index are attempts to create a more flexible structure. In a way, these structures areprecursors to hypertext and the digital search engines.

Ted Nelson talks about the free-flowing live documents on the network being subject to constant new use andlinkage, and those new links continually becoming interactively available. Any detached copy someone keeps is frozen and dead,lacking access to the new linkage. This is an interesting response to Plato’s concern about the harmful effect of literacy andwriting. If literacy and writing “killed” the text, then perhaps hypertext brings it back to life in an even more flexible form.Indeed, it may create a format that we cannot imagine now.

Hypertext would not have achieved its broad impact without the development of the modern Internet, WWW, and thehigh-density storage of hard disks and CD-ROMs. Again we have an interesting case of unintended consequences, with the seminalARPAnet evolving from a research and defense tool into the popular business, educational, communication, and personal informationlifeline it has become today.