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
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 to Guide have slowed down significantly. The (non-WWW) hypertext market is now dominated by Storyspace, available for Macintosh and Windows.