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History Of Hypertext Systems
Starting with
Douglas Engelbart's influential NLS system
in 1968, several working hypertext systems have been developed over the years
by individuals and teams as both research efforts and commercial products.
Some
of the leading historical hypertext systems are summarized below in chronological
order.
- ZOG. Developed by Donald McCracken and Robert Akscyn in 1972 at
Carnegie Mellon University. The name ZOG was chosen because it was easy to
say. A ZOG
database consisted of frames of text organized hierarchically, with some hypertext
like cross-referencing capability. The first implementation ran on an IBM mainframe,
and then was
ported to PERQ workstations.
- KMS. The developers of ZOG, McCracken and Akscyn, started the
company Knowledge Systems in 1981 and developed the Knowledge Management
System, KMS, to build on ZOG. KMS managed both text and graphics on a local
area network and ran on Sun and Apollo workstations. KMS was commercialized
in 1983, and provided advanced functionality such as keyword searching, collaboration
capabilities, and security features.
- FRESS. The File Retrieval
and Editing System (FRESS) was developed by Yankelovich and Meyrowitz
in 1985 to build on Engelbart's NLS system. FRESS enabled outline management,
and cross-referencing between files.
- NoteCard. Developed
at Xerox Parc in 1985 to provide a hypertext environment for text
and graphics, and contained a useful outline capability.
- Intermedia. Developed at Brown University in 1985 for the Apple Macintosh
to support teaching of courses. Intermedia integrated the Inter family of applications
including the InterDraw graphics program, the InterPix image viewer, the InterSpect
3-D object viewer, the InterText text editor, and the InterVal timeline editorn,
with hypertext like interlinking.
- Guide. Developed by Peter Brown in 1986 at the University of Kent at Canterbury (UKC) as the first commercial hypertext system for the personal computer, enabling hypertext linking and browsing of information and a content update capability. Guide won the British Computer Society award for technical innovation, and was featured in a Royal Society INTERLINKS exhibition. It was later sold as a commercial product by InfoAccess.com.
- HyperCard. Developed by Bill Atkinson in 1987 for the Macintosh
computer, making a hypertext system widely available for the first time.
HyperCard enabled browsing, authoring, and included the HyperTalk programming
language to enable a highly customizable graphical environment, and was widely
used and influential.
- Hypertext Editing System. Developed in 1991 by Rada to support
hypertext branching text and menus on an IBM mainframe computer. Some attempt was made
at commercialization but not completed.
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