WWW: Beyond the Basics


1. History of the World Wide Web

1.1 History of Hypertext

1.1.1 Memex

The history of hypertext begins in July of 1945. President Roosevelt's science advisor during World War II, Dr. Vannevar Bush, proposes Memex in an article titled As We May Think published in The Atlantic Monthly. In the article, Bush outlines the ideas for a machine that would have the capacity to store textual and graphical information in such a way that any piece of information could be arbitrarily linked to any other piece. In his own words:

Moreover, Memex would also give the user the capability to create an information trail of traveled links which could later be retrieved. The following excerpts from the article As We May Think further outline Dr. Bush's vision.

1.1.2 Hypertext

In 1965, Ted Nelson coined the terms "hypertext" and "hypermedia" in a paper to the ACM 20th national conference.[Nielsen , DeBra] In an article published by Literary Machines, Nelson explained:

The first hypertext-based system was developed in 1967 by a team of researchers led by Dr. Andries van Dam at Brown University. The research was funded by IBM and the first hypertext implementation, Hypertext Editing System, ran on an IBM/360 mainframe. IBM later sold the system to the Houston Manned Spacecraft Center which reportedly used it for the Apollo space program documentation. A year later, in 1968, van Dam developed FRESS, a File Retrieval and Editing System which was an improvement of his original Hypertext Editing System and was used commercially by Philips. [SU]

Doug Engelbart of the Stanford Research Institute, inventor of the mouse, was also inspired by the hypertext idea. In 1968 he introduced his NLS, the oN Line System, which held in a "shared journal," over 100,000 papers, reports, memos and cross references. [W3C , SU]

In 1972, researchers at Carnegie-Mellon University began development of ZOG (doesn't stand for anything!). ZOG was a large database designed for a multiuser environment. The ZOG database consisted of frames which, in turn, consisted of a title, a description, a line with standard ZOG commands, and a set of menu items (called selections) leading to other frames. The ZOG database was text-only and originally ran on an IBM mainframe. A PERQ workstation implementation of ZOG was used on the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson. Two of the original developers of ZOG, Donald McCracken and Robert Akscyn, later developed KMS, Knowledge Management System, which was an improved version of ZOG. KMS ran on Sun and HP Apollo workstations with much enhanced performance. Though KMS included a GUI, it still remained a text-based system. It was intended to be a collaborative tool, in that users could modify the contents of a frame and the changes would be immediately visible to others through dynamically updated links. [DeBra , SU , W3C]

In 1978, Andrew Lippman of MIT Architecture Machine Group, lead a team of researchers that developed what is argued to be the first true hypermedia system called the Aspen Movie Map. This application was a virtual ride simulation through the city of Aspen, Colorado. Four cameras, pointing in different directions, were mounted on a truck which was driven through the streets of Aspen. The cameras took pictures at regular intervals, and all the pictures were compiled onto videodisks. The images were linked in such a way that would allow the user to start at a given point and move forward, back, left, or right. Once a route through the city was chosen, the system could display the images in rapid succession creating a movie-like motion. The system also included images of the interior of several landmark Aspen buildings, so the user could take a virtual tour of these buildings. Another interesting feature of the system was a navigation map which was displayed in addition to the movie window. The user could jump directly to a point on the city map instead of finding the way through the city streets to that destination. The Aspen Movie Map was a landmark in hypermedia development in that, through a sophisticated application, it demonstrated what could be achieved with the technology available at the time. [DeBra , SU , W3C]

1.1.3 Xanadu

Ted NelsonIn my limited reading on the history of computing, I have not encountered any subject as passionately discussed as Xanadu. Its followers believe in it with almost religious zeal and its skeptics bash it with equal conviction. Theodor Holm Nelson, a writer, film-maker, and software designer, conceived the idea of Xanadu in 1981. In his own words, "explaining it quickly:" [Gromov]

    1. Xanadu is a system for the network sale of documents with automatic royalty on every byte.
    2. The transclusion feature allows quotation of fragments of any size with royalty to the original publisher.
    3. This is an implementation of a connected literature.
    4. It is a system for a point-and-click universe.
    5. This is a completely interactive docuverse.

Andrew Pam, in his Where World Wide Web Went Wrong article explains transclusion as:

In the Xanadu scheme, a universal document database (docuverse), would allow addressing of any substring of any document from any other document. "This requires an even stronger addressing scheme than the Universal Resource Locators used in the World-Wide Web." [De Bra] Additionally, Xanadu would permanently keep every version of every document, thereby eliminating the possibility of a broken link and the ever-so-familiar 404-Document Not Found error. Xanadu would only maintain the current version of the document in its entirety. The previous versions could then be dynamically reconstructed from the current version through a very sophisticated versioning system which would keep track of modifications made to each generation of the document. In Samuel Taylor Coleridge's poem, Kubla Khan, Xanadu is a "magic place of literary memory" where nothing is ever forgotten.[Gromov , Zeltser]

Xanadu was never implemented. In his article in Wired Magazine, The Curse of Xanadu, Gary Wolf writes:

Despite these harsh words, Wolf later writes:

Wolfsbane is Nelson's retort to Gary Wolf's 'Curse of Xanadu' in Wired Magazine published by the Xanadu project.

After years of frustration, Ted Nelson accepted an invitation from Japan in 1994, and founded the Sapporo HyperLab where he continued his Xanadu research. He is currently a Professor of Environmental Information at the Shonan Fujisawa Campus of Keio University.

1.1.4 Other Landmarks

Other landmarks in the history of hypertext include Janet Walker's 1985 Symbolics Document Examiner which was the first hypertext-based system to gain wide-spread acceptance and usage. The system provided the manual for Symbolics computers in hypertext format as opposed to the 8000 page printed version. This application was significant in that it was generic enough to be used for general purposes. This was a change from other hypertext applications of that time which were written for specific needs. The application gave the users the option to bookmark nodes within the document database. [DeBra]

Also in 1985, Xerox released NoteCards, a LISP-based hypertext system. NoteCards' unique features included scrolling windows for each notecard, pre-formatted specialized notecards, and a separate browser/navigator window. Another hypertext application released in 1985 was Brown University's Intermedia for the Macintosh A/UX system. [DeBra]

In 1986 Office Workstations Ltd (OWL) introduced OWL-Guide, which was a hypertext system developed for the Macintosh. The original version of Guide was a PERQ workstation hypertext system based on the work of Peter Brown of University of Kent at Canterbury developed in 1982. OWL-Guide was later ported to the IBM-PC platform and became the first multi-platform hypertext system. The application gained wide-spread acceptance due to the popularity of the Macintosh platform. [DeBra]

In 1987, Bill Atkinson of Apple Computers introduced HyperCard. Apple bundled the application free with all Macintosh machines. HyperCard soon-after became the most widely used hypertext system and many HyperCard-based applications were developed. Many believe HyperCard to be the application that contributed the most to the popularization of the hypertext model. ACM held the first Conference on Hypertext later that year. [DeBra]

In 1989, the World Wide Web came along...

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Shahrooz Feizabadi <shahrooz@vt.edu>