Some very interesting posts. Good idea. Here is my personal favorite product I designed:
HyperTIES In 1983 (long before the web) my friend Ben Shneiderman showed me a concept he had developed -- a highlighted link that you could click on and jump to a new page in an article. Of course he had reinvented hypertext but we did not it at the time. Ben created a DOS software program called TIES (The Interactive Encyclopedia System). When I saw TIES, I was excited and obtained a license from the University of Maryland to continue its commercial development. Working with a team that included Whitney Quesenbery and James Terry, we created an authoring program and browser and named it HyperTIES. This pre-web browser had a markup language called HTML (HyperTIES markup language), run time formatting of articles, a history stack, blue underlined hyperlinks, image maps, and a scripting language (a version of BASIC). We came up with a lot of concepts that are part of today's web. But of course we did not have a web so the pages that we linked to were stored on a single PC. We conceived of it as a publishing tool for encyclopedias. Our original version was written in DOS and we later created a Windows version. A number of companies adopted HyperTIES including AT&T Bell Labs, Union Carbide, and Hewlett Packard (which used it to document its LaserJet 4 printer). The ACM published a widely-circulated interactive package called Hypertext on Hypertext, designed to acquaint people with this new technology. In 1989, Tim Berners-Lee referred to this disk his proposal to create the World Wide http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/History/1989/proposal.html. Berners-Lee stated, ". . .several programs have been made exploring these ideas, both commercially and academically. Most of them use "hot spots" in documents, like icons, or highlighted phrases, as sensitive areas. Touching a hot spot with a mouse brings up the relevant information, or expands the test on the screen to include it. Imagine, then, then references in this document, all being associated with the network address of the thing to which they referred, so that while reading this document you could skip to them with a click of the mouse." So perhaps in a small way, our work helped inspire the world wide web. If you Google HyperTIES you will find about 4,700 references to it. Once the web came out and Netscape launched its browser, I retired HyperTIES. Charlie . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Posted from the new ixda.org http://www.ixda.org/discuss?post=25992 ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
