Guide

Peter Brown started Guide [B87] as a hypertext research project at the University of Kent at Canterbury, around 1982. The first version ran on PERQ workstations in 1983. The company Office Workstations Ltd (OWL) got interested in Guide, and started developing a version for the Macintosh, in 1984.

OWL-Guide was released in 1986, making it the first popular commercial general-purpose hypertext system. Later it was also ported to the IBM PC, and was the first hypertext system available for both the Mac and the PC.

Most hypertext systems use pagination when following a link, meaning that the currently displayed node is replaced by the destination of a link. In Guide the main link-mechanism is based on replacement, meaning that when following a link the current node breaks open, making room for the destination node. The anchor of the link is replaced by the contents of the destination node. One can close the destination node, which means that it is once again replaced by the text of the anchor. Replacement means that the structure of the hyperdocument must be strictly hierarchical.

In addition to replacement anchors, Guide supports pop-ups for small annotations, and so called jumps, which behave like the follow-link operation in most hypertexts. (They cause the current node to be replaced completely by the destination node.) The jumps provide a way to create non-hierarchical links.

OWL has been bought by Matsushita, and developments on Guide have slowed down significantly. The (non-WWW) hypertext market is now dominated by Storyspace, available for Macintosh and Windows.