Glossary: hypertext
That'll be text that drinks a lot of coffee and talks real fast.
Just kidding.
Hypertext is a form of writing in which written elements are associated or linked
with each other in some way, allowing readers to jump from one location within the
text to the associated location without having to read everything which would
otherwise fall between.
The World Wide Web, of course, is the most famous and largest hypertext. Odds
are good you reached this page by clicking a link somewhere. That's hypertext.
The history of hypertext seems to go back to 1945, when legendary American
science type Vannevar Bush
proposed an information retrieval system which he
called "Memex". Bush's article was called
"As We May Think", and through the magic of Web
hypertext you can read it by clicking there if you like. The interesting thing
about Memex was that Bush thought of it as a machine, a mechanical contraption of
fantastic complexity. Naturally he wasn't serious, but the concept of
hypertext was launched.
The term "hypertext" was invented in 1965 by
Ted Nelson,
as part of a very ambitious project he called
Xanadu.
Xanadu is more than a technology, it's a vision of how technology and
intellectual property can intersect in an intriguingly utopian way.
Here's how it's described on the project's home page: "Since
1960, we have fought for a world of deep electronic documents --
with side-by-side intercomparison and frictionless re-use of copyrighted
material." Sound like a bunch of commies to us.
Hypertext first became really practical in a large-scale way when
Apple
introduced their Macintosh-based HyperCard system in 1987.
HyperCard was written by legendary hacker Bill Atkinson, who also wrote
the programs which draw the
Macintosh's
graphical interface. Talk about pioneering.
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Tim Berners-Lee
developed HTML and the
World Wide Web
in 1991, while working at
CERN,
the physics lab in Switzerland. In 1995, the
Netscape
corporation,
developers of the then-most-popular browser, gained a market value of about
$3,000,000,000 on the day of its IPO. Today it all belongs to
Microsoft.
Except for small pockets of developers working like guerilla fighters: I wrote
this with
Bluefish
on
Linux.
:-)
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