ARTS & FARCES internet

In 2003, I had a catastrophic equipment failure in my office. My working hard disk—including all of my manuscripts—and its backups were destroyed. Back then I never archived my projects, only backed them up, redundantly. I thought that was enough. I was mistaken. In referring to my earlier writings, I discovered that much of that writing holds up pretty well, so I’m reproducing it here for reference and the record. This article is the introduction and overview from Macintosh Hypermedia Volume I, Reference Guide (Scott, Foresman and Company, 1990).

The concept of hypertext, and its more recent hypermedia branchings, has not changed much since first envisioned by Vannevar Bush in 1945. It has taken this long for both the hardware and software to catch up. Now, with the introduction of the Macintosh hypermedia software tools such as OWL International’s Guide and Apple’s HyperCard, we have the beginnings of nothing short of a paradigm shift in the way we deal with data, information, and knowledge.

These software tools, however, are only half of the complete hypermedia solution; to be really useful, they require appropriate hardware that is only now beginning to appear. Apple’s recent introduction of a CD-ROM drive targeted for the mass market signals the first acknowledgment by a major computer manufacturer of this vast opportunity to reshape the way individuals work with overwhelming amounts of data and information, and, in turn, refine that raw data and information into useful knowledge tools.

The availability of appropriate hardware and software solutions for the Macintosh community leaves only a single stumbling block to overcome - a somewhat typical chicken-and-egg dilemma. Few CD-ROM titles will be available, and most will be of questionable quality and innovation, until a terminal mass in unit sales of the CD-ROM drives themselves is reached. Conversely, few CD-ROM drives will be sold until unique and plentiful titles are available. This is at least partially addressed by Apple’s entry into the CD-ROM drive market with a reasonably priced unit that is sure to appeal to a broad base of users.

The foreseeable CD-ROM products, however, can at best be termed first generation and as few as two years from now will be seen as terribly obsolete. CD-ROM is a read-only storage medium (it’s only half-literate; it can’t write), and as Ted Nelson said, “... a read-only medium in this day and age [is] intrinsically oppressive.” For this reason, CD-ROM will not play an equal role (relative to the hypermedia software tools) in the work proposed here; it will be surveyed, along with other mass-storage devices as guideposts to future incarnations of more appropriate hardware.

The problem

As we move from a product-based economy, exemplified by overconsumption of nonrenewable resources, to an economy based largely on intangibles, we will all undergo some serious stress. As we collectively make this shift between the tangible and the intangible, we will be confronted with the regenerative nature of the new intangibles: information, data, and knowledge. We will all be confronted in our daily lives with access to literally mountains of data. Many of us will be at a loss as to how to navigate this unfamiliar territory, although some of us will strive to transform raw data and information into useful knowledge. While it’s likely that we all may be offered access to the tools, most of us will not have the navigational skills and deep pockets required to make use of these wondrous implements.

Worst of all, few of us are even aware of the problem, let alone of the possible solutions in the form of navigational aids.

This book will identify the problems we all will face with the influx of data and information and will provide an overview of the hypermedia navigational tools available now as well as those on the near horizon. It also will investigate the transformative process, from raw information to useful knowledge—a renewable-resource-to-renewable/regenerative-resource process rather than the nonrenewable-resource-to-product process of the era we’re now leaving.

Perhaps hypermedia is most appropriately perceived as a knowledge transescalator. It carries us not only up and down the mountain of information available to us, but transversely as well. A nostalgic rather than futuristic image comes to me as I write this—one of my great-grandfather’s study lined with books. He had a small ladder on wheels to navigate the upper reaches of his library, and he could climb up or down pretty well, but he had to climb all the way down the ladder to transverse the library. And the ladder was “hard-wired” to the library shelves; it couldn’t be moved to access other libraries. I can’t help but think of his reaction to these new information navigators that we have at our fingertips. The potential for the mass customization of information using these knowledge transescalators and the subsequent distillation of that information into knowledge boggles the mind.

The purpose of this book

There must be close to 20 HyperCard books on the market as I write this, with more on the way. Yet no one has adequately addressed the foundation on which this marvelous product is based; nor has anyone discussed in anything other than the most cursory of manners the underlying concepts of hypermedia.

Many people mistakenly believe that hypermedia’s roots begin with HyperCard. While HyperCard advanced the concept by putting the power of a rudimentary hypermedia production and browsing system in the hands of everyone, Apple has been remiss in its refusal to recognize significant advances that came before the mid-1980s.

Hypermedia’s underlying precept—the interlinking of nonlinear information and information structures—dates back to the mid-1940s. Of course, in the 1940s we didn’t have computers, but we did have a state-of-the-art information storage and retrieval device: the microfilm.

Vannevar Bush’s ground-breaking noodling that started all of this was embodied in an article, “As We May Think,” published in the August 1945 issue of The Atlantic Monthly, and proposed a device based on the then-state-of-the-art microfilm technology called a “memex.” Bush’s concept of the memex machine led to Douglas Engelbart’s work, culminating in the ideas, further developed by others to create what we now recognize as word processing, outline processing, the mouse, windows, electronic mail, and networks. Engelbart referred to the general body of his work as “The Augmentation of the Human Intellect,” by which he meant the helping of humans to think and work better by giving them more appropriate and better quality tools to work with. The work of both Bush and Engelbart led to Ted Nelson’s work, exemplified by Computer Lib/Dream Machines, Literary Machines, and Project Xanadu. Ted Nelson is credited with introducing the term hypertext and continues working on a networked hypermedia system and other knowledge tools. There are many other hypermedia imagineers who have advanced the state of the art of hypermedia, and they also are covered within these pages. They are not mentioned in this introduction because they are not so well known to the hypermedia novice and their contributions are perhaps not so readily recognizable.

Ironically, neither Bush, Engelbart, nor Nelson has produced a viable commercial product. Bellevue, Washington-based OWL International, Inc., successfully marketed the first hypertext system for a microcomputer; their Guide and Envelope products for the Macintosh were followed closely by an IBM PC version of the Guide product. Apple followed two years later with HyperCard, unquestionably the most commercially successful and popular hypermedia system currently available for any microcomputer. Other commercial and noncommercial hypermedia systems have been implemented and they will be covered here as well.

As much as I disliked history and an historical perspective during my formal schooling, I’ve since come to realize that in order for us to know where we’re going - both as individuals and collectively as a society - we must know where we’ve been. Apple, with its thinly veiled attempts to rewrite history or at least ignore it, is a potentially consequential disservice to the community and we need to recognize those that came before so we can continue to build and move forward.

Why I wrote this book

This year marks my tenth year of self-employment. As I pause to look back at my endeavors over the past decade I’m confronted with always having been a little too early on the breaking scene. I began my creative endeavors writing poetry and short stories while in undergraduate school and quickly came to realize that I couldn’t only write and continue to eat.

I was very fortunate to spend my years of undergraduate and graduate education studying under a handful of very gifted educators and remarkable individuals. I knew, after a brief excursion into it—and surely on some level before—that there was no way that I was going to work within my field of study: humanistic psychology.

While still in graduate school, I began to explore other areas of creative expression that were open to me. At the time (the mid- and late-1970s) independent video production-guerilla television and the video art realm was beginning to take shape from the miasma of everything that came before: everything from the free-speech movement to street theater and beyond. My wife, Karen, and I formed a small independent video production house and pledged to explore the medium in relation to the arts. At that time I also was writing my Master’s thesis on the elimination of technology in general, and television in particular, so I felt it was best to have a working knowledge of the beast with which I was embroiled.

Before I completed my graduate studies, we got a case of itchy feet and decided we needed to be in a community more conducive to small-scale video production on a cooperative basis. We were living in a small, company-owned college town in the south at the time and had narrowed our choices down to Woodstock, New York, and Minneapolis, Minnesota. Both communities offered a nurturing community for video artists, and we made Minneapolis our choice.

Our fledgling production company, ARTS & FARCES, bumped along for the next few years, and I had the overwhelming feeling that we were just a little too early and just a little too little. We enjoyed our small successes and lived with the bumps but largely felt we were spinning our wheels.

Infatuated with electronics, I decided that I had to have a character generator to spiff up our productions and avoid the exorbitant studio fees for the titling part of the postproduction process. I looked at everything, quickly got discouraged at the price tags, and naively wandered into a computer dealer and asked if they had anything that could serve my purpose. As it turned out, they had this neat thing that Dick Cavett was advertising at the time, called an Apple ][, that I was assured could do all that and more. Of course they didn’t bother to tell me they didn’t bother to tell me that the video output from the Apple was not broadcast quality. I learned that the hard way. Again, too soon and a little too little.

I’ll never forget the day I bought the Apple ][ with a whopping 48K of memory and two—count ‘em two—143K floppy disk drives. The salesman (they were all men then) asked if I needed any blank disks, and I said that I supposed I did with a sort of glazed look. He asked me how many I needed, and when I found out that they held 143,000 characters each, I replied confidently and without hesitation: One! I’ll never fill all that space. Once again, a little too soon and this time, a lot too little. Now we speak in terms of multiple gigabytes, and like the budget deficit I don’t do numbers that big.

I began spending more time piddling with the Apple ][ in concert with the video camera and got my second glimpse of infinity: setting the computer monitor on top of the television monitor and shooting both of them with the video camera (my first glimpse was like everyone else’s: the Morton salt box with the picture of the little girl holding the Morton salt box, which in turn held a picture of the little girl…). I began experimenting with both mediums and longed to join the two in a tempestuous marriage. During that time I also discovered that I could use the computer to write—and more importantly edit and rewrite—on screen rather than on paper (I didn’t buy a printer until two years after I bought the computer and then only for letters with non-computer using correspondents). During that period I also ran into Ted Nelson’s Computer Lib/Dream Machines and hid it for years, forcing myself to forget about it. I felt I was already riding the wave too far ahead of the crest, and Nelson wasn’t even in this dimension let alone the same ocean. I didn’t need another distraction.

The Macintosh came out in early 1984, and like everyone else, I had my knickers in a knot after seeing MacPaint. But I was committed to the Apple ][ and I knew that given a few weeks, Bill Budge could come up with the same thing on the Apple ][ and in color. He did, but it wasn’t the same. By then I was computer-literate and no longer a computerphobe. I dismissed the original (and the second) Macintosh model because it could only handle a ten-page-or-so document—I was looking for an excuse and easily found ten or so. But those graphics and that interface haunted me. I was hooked, I knew it. In 1986, with the introduction of the Macintosh Plus I ran out of excuses and bit the bullet. I changed, and my work changed.

I began reading everything I could find written by this guy, Jerry Daniels. He was dangling even further out than I was, came from a similar hippytrippy, new-age educational background and was writing about the Macintosh changing human consciousness. I knew it was happening, but I wasn’t about to admit it in public. Daniels was saying it out there in front of God and everybody. Loud even. I also dug out the old Ted Nelson book. I sighed and resigned myself to flying out there on the far edge. But at least I’d have company, and these birds were really out there without a net. I assured myself that I’d be safe as long as I stayed just a bit behind these guys.

That same year OWL International released the first hypertext product for a microcomputer, Guide, and it ran on a Macintosh. I remembered the hyper term from reading Nelson and called the company to see if it was the same thing. It was and I ordered a copy on the spot—took a bunch of them to a trade show, demonstrated it, and watched in dismay as everyone’s eyes glazed.

In January of 1987 I began publishing an electronic magazine, the ARTS & FARCES Review, using the Guide hypertext system. Many of the readers didn’t “get” the hypertext concept, but were interested in what I had to say. Many complained that they were always feeling like they were missing something. Interestingly, that remains one of the most difficult hurdles hypermedia must overcome. At any rate I began publishing in the electronic MicroFilm format, using a product designed by Jerry Daniels and published by Buck Wheat and Associates. The MicroFilm product, while not hypermedia, allowed me to publish electronically in a format palatable to most Macintosh users. The singularly most significant thing it did—and continues to do—was to wean the readers from ink on paper. The documents were designed to be read on screen, although they also could be printed out.

In August of 1987, Apple introduced HyperCard at the MacWorld/Boston Expo. I had been fortunate enough to receive prerelease versions from Apple and had two HyperCard products at the expo concurrent with Apple’s introduction—both were information and demonstration stacks of products for software companies. Unfortunately, neither product has made it to the market. Sigh. Too soon, but no longer too little. And that’s the legacy HyperCard promises: empowerment for the individual. We finally managed to get on the horse and ride in the direction it was going. It’s exciting, and it’s happening now, and nobody is too soon or too little. Come on along.

Introduction to the concepts of hypermedia

Like independent video production mentioned previously, hypertext and hypermedia build on a wealth of disciplines that came before them. Hypertext was a term coined by Ted Nelson in the mid-1960s to describe the process of creation, storage, and retrieval of nonlinear ideas and information. Nelson attributes the underlying seed of his concept of hypertext to Vannevar Bush, or, more specifically, to Bush’s concept of the “memex” proposed in his 1945 Atlantic Monthly “As We May Think” article.

Bush was working on a “memex” system that would allow “knowledge trails” to be built through research materials. These trails were pathways connected by links, and Bush’s envisioned “memex” system would provide a more appropriate way of transmitting and retrieving vast amounts of information. Memex was basically a publishing vehicle that could hold all written material and allow any user to make “trails” in the material.

OK, fine, but what does that mean for me?

Well, let me give you a personal example. While most people view hypertext as an information creation, storage, and retrieval tool, I view hypertext as a “creative-process-enhancer.”

I recently discovered a creative writing technique known as “clustering.” Clustering is the brainchild (as far as I know) of a writing teacher by the name of Gabriele Lusser-Rico. Lusser-Rico, in her book, Writing the Natural Way, defines clustering as “a nonlinear brainstorming process akin to free association. It makes an invisible Design-mind process visible through a nonlinear spilling out of lightning associations that allows patterns to emerge.” As a nonlinear activity, clustering is well-suited to hypertext.

OK, fine, but what does that mean for me?

Well, consider that report you have to present to your work group next week. You know, the one you ordinarily would begin by developing your ideas in MORE, transferring your outline into Microsoft Word for embellishment, and finally printing out on the LaserWriter for distribution to the group during the meeting.

The very farsighted of you are saying to yourself, “Ah, but I skip the Microsoft Word and LaserWriter steps and create and display the entire project in MORE, using its slide-show capabilities.”

Consider this: MORE, while a very useful tool, handicaps your creativity by forcing you to work and think hierarchically—albeit without quite so rigid linearity. Also, what do you do in the middle of the meeting when one of the work group members has input that you need to incorporate into your outline? Again, this can be done “on the fly” in MORE, but only on a hierarchical and sometimes linear basis.

People don’t think linearly. It’s not natural. We all think in a nonlinear manner, whether we like to admit it or not. Hypertext and hypermedia allow you to think, design, and display information in a natural, nonlinear manner. Just like we think.

Hypertext generally refers to nonsequential writing. The reader is constantly presented with a series of branches and choices of bits to explore next. The branches and choices are connected via “links” that enable the reader to form “pathways.” This branching pathway structure has been contained in systems ranging from the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center “Notecard” system to the Brown University Hypertext system to the Hypertext Abstract Machine at Tektronix to OWL’s Guide to Apple’s own HyperCard. Hypertext is designed to be read on an interactive computer screen and, in fact, is one of the main components of the mythical (for now, anyway) “paperless office.”

Perhaps hypertext can be best thought of as a multidimensional word processor. You enter information into the document as you would with a word processor. But then the fun begins. Say you decide to elaborate on a section. You simply would select the section of text and define the passage of text (or graphic!) as a link to another section of the document; in this case your elaboration. Alternatively, the selected text (or the entire document) can be linked to other text in another document, perhaps even on another computer. As simply as that you can create any number of hyperlinks, comprising a hyperspace, each with different qualities.

Rather than attaching an end note with a graphic of your work group’s budget for the next quarter, you can create a hypertext link in the document. This link, when clicked with the mouse (or otherwise activated), displays the group’s budget as a pie chart that you imported via the Clipboard from Excel. Or, if need be, it could even open the Excel document and display your graph and underlying data. Additionally, each slice of the pie chart can be linked to further supporting documentation in the form of explanations and embellishments, etc. Like the skin of an onion, the layers of information can be peeled away, without tears, to reveal an intricate labyrinth of information structure.

Nelson takes the original concept of hypertext and extends it one step further and arrives at compound hypertext—where one hypertext “windows” to other materials and is not necessarily limited to computer text and graphics. Think about that one for a minute. “The structure of ideas is never sequential; and indeed, our thought processes are not very sequential either,” said Nelson. “True, only a few thoughts at a time pass across the central screen of the mind; but as you consider a thing, your thoughts crisscross it constantly, reviewing first one connection, then another. Each new idea is compared with many parts of the whole picture, or with some mental visualization of the whole picture itself.”

OK, so we have hypertext and compound hypertext. Next comes high bandwidth hypermedia: things such as hypertext documents connected to digital sound and music recording connected to high-deftnition video imaging devices. Now remember—this isn’t television-flash-‘n’-trash-nextcentury ramblings—this is doable now. Today.

Ted Nelson sounded the political alarms early enough so that there’s no excuse for letting the information-distribution mechanisms become constricted. Referring to the hypermedia hybrid he was stringently clear: “Supposedly when they come out these media will be mass-marketed disks, sold only in a final form, and thus, like phonograph records, delivered by the Information Lords to the Information Peons. This is rather unlike the prevailing thought among computer-text-system people, where everyone’s contribution is thought to be valued.”

Interestingly, Nelson’s proposed system, Project Xanadu, is designed in such a way as to eliminate the problem of the gatekeepers, the Information Lords. Ted Nelson and his Xanadu design team specifically designed the system to be used by a series of “normal” users, thereby eliminating the need for system administrators and operators as we have come to accept the terms. The design group designed, and has begun to implement, the system on the basis of true equality—the design team themselves desiring nothing more than to be normal users as opposed to gatekeepers. “It is not that our wants are modest, but rather that we want to put an emperor’s resources at the fingertips of all users, especially children and scientists and poets.”

Nelson’s Xanadu system is a hypertext repository for almost any form of material ranging from ordinary text and pictures to musical notation and recordings to photographs and video material. Furthermore, the system is designed for fast retrieval and delivery of linked documents. According to Nelson, this will provide all of us with the assimilation tools for alternative versions, historical backtracks, and “arbitrary collaging.”

Best of all, the Xanadu storage and retrieval system will be completely transparent to the user. “Bit-map graphics will be stored in such a way as to allow panning (graphical scrolling) and zoom (continuously increasing or decreasing magnification) as incremental data deliveries. (How your screen machine will show them is another matter.) Three-dimensional objects, when implemented, may be collaged by users into compound objects, scenes from history, enactments and artwork.”

Obviously, Macintosh with its graphical interface, will have a distinct advantage for use as what Nelson refers to as a “screen machine.” Hence this book is Macintosh-specific. There will be other hypermedia systems—both shared and individual—for virtually all computer systems. But Macintosh has the inside-rail position and enough creative, farsighted individuals are involved in Macintosh hypermedia production to keep the envelope stretched to its limits; and the installed base is large enough to ensure the advancement of hypermedia with or without Apple’s continued support. Hopefully it will be with.