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 from Macintosh Hypermedia Volume I, Reference Guide (Scott, Foresman and Company, 1990).

Ironically, most of the concepts underlying hypertext and hypermedia were proposed by individuals very few of us have heard of. Largely because these farsighted individuals were involved in the business of creating ideas rather than products, they are not remembered. Their ideas, however, will outlive any of our children’s children.

Many would rewrite history and would have us believe that hypermedia, as well as its hypertext harbinger, are relatively new developments. And they’re right when you look at a time line of man’s—or even this society’s—history. But they are seriously mistaken when you look at the miniscule slice of the same time line dealing with computers.

Even more serious is the bandying about of the “hyper” moniker in relation to concepts of not even the most remote of relations to the underlying concepts of what we have come to refer to as hypermedia. You’ll often hear the term interactive multimedia tossed about as synonymous with hypermedia. I think that’s a mistake, too—a form of shortsightedness—as multimedia, interactive or otherwise, is itself a form of hypermedia, but to use it as a blanket label is confusing and misleading. Besides, isn’t media already a plural form? Those of us who grew up in the 1960s remember full well what multimedia is, and, while the “multimedia experience” helped to expand our collective consciousness, it had little to do with the underlying concepts of hypertext and hypermedia.

So, we have added two very powerful new terms to our high-tech vocabulary in a very short time: hypertext and hypermedia. More than buzzwords and marketing hooks, the history of the discipline (and they are a single discipline) is rich. It’s important that we have a firm grasp on that history before we can understand why hypermedia has become so popular—so mainstream—all of a sudden, after having languished in relative obscurity for more than 40 years.

Hypertext, as a concept, dates back to the mid-1940s and as a word to the mid-1960s. An underlying thread runs through the discipline’s development from conception to the present. The proponents of hypertext and its younger sibling, hypermedia, have been accurately labeled both visionaries and crackpots—at the same time, sometimes by the same observers. Like a lemon seed on a kitchen counter, the kernel of wisdom that sparked the hyper revolution is easily identified but a bit harder to grasp. Once you think you have it, more likely than not you watch as the kernel squirts out of your grip and comes to rest somewhere else.

Why did it take so long for this concept to reach the state of paradigm shift? And why are things happening so quickly now in relation to hypermedia?

Mainly what has happened in recent years is that our technology finally has begun to catch up with the crackpots, urn, I mean visionaries. A very short time ago, affordable computers with the necessary speed coupled with appropriate mass-storage devices (both magnetic and optical) and an easy-to-use graphical interface were unheard of. Now the hardware has arrived, and the first-generation—and in some cases, second-generation—hypermedia software is in the hands of literally millions of knowledge explorers and information developers.

Although the concept of nonlinear writing, reading, and retrieval designed to be read on a computer screen wasn’t given a proper name until the 1960s, the underlying concept dates back to the summer of 1945 and one of the most advanced thinkers of that time, Vannevar Bush. The United States was embroiled in World War II and most of the country’s efforts, including science and research, were focused on a singular goal: ending the war. In 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt named Vannevar Bush to supervise and coordinate all federally funded research through the Office of Scientific Research and Development.

In the summer of 1945, The Atlantic Monthly published Bush’s seminal article, “As We May Think,” a far-reaching piece that is credited—in hindsight, of course—as the impetus for a wealth of computer science concepts, most notably for what we have come to know as hypertext and hypermedia. It is a very chilling effect to read Bush’s piece today, with the benefit of having seen many of his crackpot visions come to fruition, albeit in forms further advanced than originally proposed. Bush accurately predicted high-resolution displays, fast information retrieval, and mass storage, all of which were as foreign to him as living on Mars is to us.

One of Bush’s central concepts in “As We May Think” was a machine he called the “memex,” which sprang directly from his own needs in organizing vast stores of research materials.

One of the most substantial tasks confronting Bush was the continual updating of technical information that was being generated by the scientific community at the close of World War II. He became fascinated with the concept of microfilm, and “As We May Think” was based on his ideas about it. The memex would be capable of holding all the writings generated in the scientific arena, along with cross-reference links and navigational trails. At about the same time, he also proposed the Bush Rapid Selector, a microfilm tool that later came into being as microfilm readers from the Kodak company and others. The key to the Bush Rapid Selector was the various indices on the side of each microfilm strip. Bush’s concept of’ “trails” were marks and sequencing cues that now are called paths or tours in hypermedia parlance.

As World War II was winding down, and the scientists were freed from working on implements of destruction for the war effort and were able to pursue their individual interests, Vannevar Bush began to contemplate the direction and role of science in the future of the society. Bush became more aware of the sheer bulk of the research documents prepared during the war effort and was continually confronted with the difficult process of searching across multiple documents.

In his own words, “The world has arrived at an age of cheap complex devices of great reliability; and something is bound to come of it.” Bush was convinced that the answer to his dilemma lay in the technology itself. The then state-of-the-art technology was the microfilm that allowed scientific records to be compressed and stored, and Bush speculated that an entire encyclopedia could be compressed to fit on a single sheet of microfilm and that cheaply reproduced copies would provide access to vast amounts of information.

Vannevar Bush further speculated that there was a discernible difference between repetitive thought and creative thought and that the coming technology—including computers, voice-input devices, and scanners—would significantly enhance the creative-thought process in individuals. Researchers would be freed from mundane repetitive mental tasks and would have more time to spend on projects requiring creative thought.

Bush was well aware that the human mind operates by association and that, by extension, humans would work best by associative properties of thought. In contrast, most forms of data are stored and sorted alphabetically and information is haphazardly found by hunting it from subclass to subclass. Bush speculated that an associative selection process could be mechanized and that such a process, while significantly slower in performance than the human mind, would possess the property of permanence rather than being of a transitory nature as are human associative thought processes. Furthermore, any specific bit of data would be accessible by entering a code, and the document would be displayed on the screen. Margin notes and comments, according to Bush’s vision, could be added at any point, and associations could be constructed between two documents and displayed on adjacent screens. The association or “link”—complete with index—would be made and stored at the press of a button. The link easily could be recalled at any time, and a new microfilm, consisting only of the linked pieces of text could be created and distributed separately from the original documents.

Such a system would allow for the creation of customized encyclopedias and other vast repositories of data, designed for a specific task or range of interests. Users easily could access the information via their individual memex machines and amplify the associations with their own notes and comments.

Vannevar Bush’s tool for thought, the memex, was never built and his original vision only now is beginning to materialize. Following are his original words written in 1945, as appropriate and as astounding now as they were then.