Week 4- Failed Project Reality
Post #5
Failed Prediction: Project Xanadu
The Reality
The invention of hypertext
Ted Nelson is generally thought to have “coined” the words "hypertext" and "hypermedia" in 1965 and worked with Andries van Dam to develop the Hypertext Editing System in 1968 at Brown University.
Douglas Engelbart had begun working on his NLS system in 1962 at Stanford Research Institute, although delays in obtaining funding, personnel, and equipment meant that its key features were not completed until 1968. That year, Engelbart demonstrated a hypertext interface to the public for the first time, in what has come to be known as "The Mother of All Demos".
Funding for NLS slowed after 1974. Major work in the following decade included NoteCards at Xerox PARC and ZOG at Carnegie Mellon. ZOG started as an artificial intelligence research project under the supervision of Allen Newell. Only much later would its participants realize that their system was a hypertext system. ZOG was deployed in 1980 on the U.S.S. Carl Vinson and later commercialized as Knowledge Management System. In the early 1980s, two other significant projects were Ben Shneiderman's TIES (1983) and Intermedia at Brown University (1984).
Applications
The first hypermedia application was the Aspen Movie Map in 1977. In 1980, Tim Berners-Lee created ENQUIRE, an early hypertext database system somewhat like a wiki. The early 1980s also saw a number of experimental hypertext and hypermedia programs, many of whose features and terminology were later integrated into the Web. Guide was the first hypertext system for personal computers.
In August 1987, Apple Computer revealed its HyperCard application for the Macintosh line of computers at the MacWorld convention in Boston, Massachusetts. HyperCard was an immediate hit and helped to popularize the concept of hypertext with the general public.
(Ed Note:) Ted Vera is beaming with pride at this moment!
Meanwhile Nelson, who had been working on and advocating his Xanadu system for over two decades, along with the commercial success of HyperCard, stirred Autodesk to invest in Nelson's revolutionary ideas. The project continued at Autodesk for four years, but no product was released.
The group continued their work, almost to the point of bankruptcy. In 1993, however, Nelson met John Walker, founder of Autodesk, at a conference for the people mentioned in Steven Levy's Hackers, and the group started working on Xanadu with Autodesk's financial backing.
While at Autodesk, the group, lead by Gregory, completed a version of the software, written in the C programming language, though the software didn't work as well as they wanted. However, this version of Xanadu was successfully demonstrated at the Hackers Conference and generated considerable interest. Then a newer group of programmers, hired from Xerox PARC, used the problems with this software as justification to rewrite the software in Smalltalk. This effectively split the group into two factions, and the decision to rewrite put a deadline imposed by Autodesk out of the team's reach. In August 1992, Autodesk divested the Xanadu group, which became the Xanadu Operating Company, which struggled due to internal conflicts and lack of investment.
Charles S. Smith, the founder of a company called Memex (the name of the hypertext system designed by Vannevar Bush), hired many of the Xanadu programmers and licensed the Xanadu technology, though Memex soon faced financial difficulties, and the then-unpaid programmers left, taking the computers with them. (The programmers were eventually paid.) At around this time, Tim Berners-Lee was developing the World Wide Web.
Hypertext and the World Wide Web
In the late 1980s, Berners-Lee, then a scientist at CERN, invented the World Wide Web to meet the demand for automatic information-sharing between scientists working in different universities and institutes all over the world.
Then in early in 1993, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois released the first version of their Mosaic web browser to supplement the two existing web browsers: one that ran only on NeXTSTEP and one that was only minimally user-friendly. Mosaic ran in the X Window System environment, which was then popular in the research community, and offered usable window-based interaction. It allowed images as well as text to anchor hypertext links. It also incorporated other Internet protocols, including the Gopher protocol.
After the release of web browsers for both the PC and Macintosh environments, traffic on the World Wide Web quickly exploded from only 500 known web servers in 1993 to over 10,000 in 1994. Thus, all earlier hypertext systems were overshadowed by the success of the web, even though it lacked many features of those earlier systems, such as typed links, transclusion, and source tracking.
Implementations
Besides the already mentioned Project Xanadu, Hypertext Editing System, NLS, HyperCard, and World Wide Web, there are other noteworthy early implementations of hypertext, with different feature sets:
FRESS — A 1970s multi-user successor to the Hypertext Editing System.
Information Presentation Facility — Used to display online help in IBM operating systems.
Intermedia — A mid-1980s program for group web-authoring and information sharing.
Storyspace -- a mid-1980's program for hypertext narrative
Texinfo — The GNU help system.
XML with the XLink extension — A recent innovation in web-language related to HTML.
MediaWiki, the system that powers Wikipedia, and other wiki implementations — Relatively recent programs aiming to compensate for the lack of integrated editors in most Web browsers.
Microsoft Word — This common program has evolved from paper-only to in-computer documents using hyperlinks.
Adobe's Portable Document Format — Another common program supporting links.
Windows Help
Post #5
Failed Prediction: Project Xanadu
The Reality
The invention of hypertext
Ted Nelson is generally thought to have “coined” the words "hypertext" and "hypermedia" in 1965 and worked with Andries van Dam to develop the Hypertext Editing System in 1968 at Brown University.
Douglas Engelbart had begun working on his NLS system in 1962 at Stanford Research Institute, although delays in obtaining funding, personnel, and equipment meant that its key features were not completed until 1968. That year, Engelbart demonstrated a hypertext interface to the public for the first time, in what has come to be known as "The Mother of All Demos".
Funding for NLS slowed after 1974. Major work in the following decade included NoteCards at Xerox PARC and ZOG at Carnegie Mellon. ZOG started as an artificial intelligence research project under the supervision of Allen Newell. Only much later would its participants realize that their system was a hypertext system. ZOG was deployed in 1980 on the U.S.S. Carl Vinson and later commercialized as Knowledge Management System. In the early 1980s, two other significant projects were Ben Shneiderman's TIES (1983) and Intermedia at Brown University (1984).
Applications
The first hypermedia application was the Aspen Movie Map in 1977. In 1980, Tim Berners-Lee created ENQUIRE, an early hypertext database system somewhat like a wiki. The early 1980s also saw a number of experimental hypertext and hypermedia programs, many of whose features and terminology were later integrated into the Web. Guide was the first hypertext system for personal computers.
In August 1987, Apple Computer revealed its HyperCard application for the Macintosh line of computers at the MacWorld convention in Boston, Massachusetts. HyperCard was an immediate hit and helped to popularize the concept of hypertext with the general public.
(Ed Note:) Ted Vera is beaming with pride at this moment!
Meanwhile Nelson, who had been working on and advocating his Xanadu system for over two decades, along with the commercial success of HyperCard, stirred Autodesk to invest in Nelson's revolutionary ideas. The project continued at Autodesk for four years, but no product was released.
The group continued their work, almost to the point of bankruptcy. In 1993, however, Nelson met John Walker, founder of Autodesk, at a conference for the people mentioned in Steven Levy's Hackers, and the group started working on Xanadu with Autodesk's financial backing.
While at Autodesk, the group, lead by Gregory, completed a version of the software, written in the C programming language, though the software didn't work as well as they wanted. However, this version of Xanadu was successfully demonstrated at the Hackers Conference and generated considerable interest. Then a newer group of programmers, hired from Xerox PARC, used the problems with this software as justification to rewrite the software in Smalltalk. This effectively split the group into two factions, and the decision to rewrite put a deadline imposed by Autodesk out of the team's reach. In August 1992, Autodesk divested the Xanadu group, which became the Xanadu Operating Company, which struggled due to internal conflicts and lack of investment.
Charles S. Smith, the founder of a company called Memex (the name of the hypertext system designed by Vannevar Bush), hired many of the Xanadu programmers and licensed the Xanadu technology, though Memex soon faced financial difficulties, and the then-unpaid programmers left, taking the computers with them. (The programmers were eventually paid.) At around this time, Tim Berners-Lee was developing the World Wide Web.
Hypertext and the World Wide Web
In the late 1980s, Berners-Lee, then a scientist at CERN, invented the World Wide Web to meet the demand for automatic information-sharing between scientists working in different universities and institutes all over the world.
Then in early in 1993, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois released the first version of their Mosaic web browser to supplement the two existing web browsers: one that ran only on NeXTSTEP and one that was only minimally user-friendly. Mosaic ran in the X Window System environment, which was then popular in the research community, and offered usable window-based interaction. It allowed images as well as text to anchor hypertext links. It also incorporated other Internet protocols, including the Gopher protocol.
After the release of web browsers for both the PC and Macintosh environments, traffic on the World Wide Web quickly exploded from only 500 known web servers in 1993 to over 10,000 in 1994. Thus, all earlier hypertext systems were overshadowed by the success of the web, even though it lacked many features of those earlier systems, such as typed links, transclusion, and source tracking.
Implementations
Besides the already mentioned Project Xanadu, Hypertext Editing System, NLS, HyperCard, and World Wide Web, there are other noteworthy early implementations of hypertext, with different feature sets:
FRESS — A 1970s multi-user successor to the Hypertext Editing System.
Information Presentation Facility — Used to display online help in IBM operating systems.
Intermedia — A mid-1980s program for group web-authoring and information sharing.
Storyspace -- a mid-1980's program for hypertext narrative
Texinfo — The GNU help system.
XML with the XLink extension — A recent innovation in web-language related to HTML.
MediaWiki, the system that powers Wikipedia, and other wiki implementations — Relatively recent programs aiming to compensate for the lack of integrated editors in most Web browsers.
Microsoft Word — This common program has evolved from paper-only to in-computer documents using hyperlinks.
Adobe's Portable Document Format — Another common program supporting links.
Windows Help
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