Intermedia

The most advanced hypertext system developed at Brown University is no doubt the Intermedia system [M86]. As a commercial product Intermedia was seriously hindered by its platform: the A/UX (Unix) operating system for the Macintosh. Like Guide and NoteCards, Intermedia follows the scrolling window model, meaning that the amount of text in a node is not limited to the size of a window. (Vertical) scrolling is used to select the part of the node to be displayed.

Intermedia stands out by its linking protocol, which enables other applications to be integrated into an Intermedia hyperdocument. Links in Intermedia are always bidirectional, and connect anchors, not nodes. When following a link the destination node is always scrolled so that the destination anchor is visible.

Intermedia offers two kinds of overviews, to help the user find her way through a large document: