Hypertext back to the mid 70's... Ted Nelson, Xanadu, Apple, etc. Webs
that never made it.
> >> >> websites since 1991....my history is not that good....is this
> >> >> possible?....janet
> >
> > That late! They must be a bunch of jonny-come-lately pikers. Why, I
> >was doing this kind of stuff in 1982!
> >
> > Yes, I really was designing portable hypertext presentations and
> >demonstrating the technology in 1982.
>
> Javilk is right. Hypertext was around in 85 or so. Apple had the stuff, but
> it was single-machine based. I remember we sat around and talked about it,
Apple went public with hypercard later. I remember seeing it sometime
between 1988 and 1990. The spun off a company to do it.
However... Ted Nelson, arguably the father of Hypertext, published a
description of it in the mid seventies. Vanevar Bush or someone like that
may have said something like that even earlier. Ted Nelson, in the two
sided book "Mad Lib" / something else, said that one would move the cursor
over a word, and do something to see the document behind the word. That
is exactly what Netscape does. My question then, was how to move the
cursor, and how to make a link obvious on terminals which do not allow
underlining the link word. Having read that in the mid 70's, I promptly
forgot that, and my question. And nearly invented that I don't know how
many times, whenever I had to display a directory on some new program or
machine.
> but we couldn't figure out how to make a profit with it. No one realized the
> potential of making a hypercard stack that was accessible via multiple
> machines. So the web could have started earlier and we'd all be complaining
> that Apple is too big and that an anti-trust suit should be brought against
> them.
The problem I was trying to solve in my imagination, was how to
allow Blackthorn, in the TV mini-series "Shogun", easy access to a hidden
verbal Japanese to English (or Dutch, as it should have been,) text
translator which would record and translate all speech in its presence,
and organize it so that he could EASILY find specifics, making him a
valuable "memory carton", not unlike Sidney Carton(?) in "Tale of Two
Cities". In my mind, I hid that in his spyglass (telescope,) and figured
he only had three fingers that he could easily use for controlling the
cursor. One for back and forward tabbing of the cursor from link to link,
one for Entering the word for the related screen, and one to Escape to the
source text. (I had wanted to give him a "Star Wars" type light saber, but
figured he would be too much of a threat to the Japanese with any overt
weapon, and would thus soon up as a pincushion.) The device would also
take pictures and store them.
And then one day half a year later, I was using an exasperatingly
slow computer with an utterly awful menu system that just would not get me
from page D to page G without going back up three layers to page A each
time, and back down again... which is why in my system, I let USERS put
the links in wherever THEY needed them. After all, who's computer is it,
anyway? And who best knows how to do the work?
To date, no system that I have seen gives the user primary control
over the structure of what he is doing. Almost everywhere he goes, he
must either cope with awkward hierarchical menus he can not change, or
learn how to program macros or formal programs. The ability to just type
links to anything anywhere on the screen is what many users really loved.
Ted Nelson, in his Xanadu project, had a scheme called
"Transclusion", in which one could quote blocks of text from others, with
attribution, and later in his Xanadu Project with AutoDesk, actually
charge some miniscule view for each view of that text. He was trying to
set up franchises, like data storage equivalents of your local hamburger
joint, which would hold and serve your text, back up your disks, as well
as provide some sense of community. I did not see the resulting system.
I heard the reason AutoDesk pulled the plug was not technical, but
simply that the management of that project was not able to answer some
quick pointed questions from a higher level manager about what their
expenses were. The higher level manager simply didn't like the answers,
and had the authority to pull the plug. And so yet another possible web
fell by the wayside...
And who knows how many others had ideas which never surfaced... ideas
which may have been far better, or somewhat worse, than what we now have.
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