The key aspect of Hyperties is simplicity [S87]. Since 1987 Hyperties has been available as a commercial product for the IBM-PC. It is marketed by Cognetics Corporation. Hyperties uses the plain text-screen of a PC, and does not need a mouse for user-interaction. The anchors are highlighted in the text, and the user can move the cursor over them by means of the cursor keys. The cursor does not move in single line or character increments but jumps to the nearest anchor. Following a link simply means a replacement of the current node by the destination node. Each node fills the entire screen, with the exception of a few lines at the bottom, used for additional information and paging buttons. A node may consist of several pages of text, which can be viewed by paging up and down.
When the cursor is over an anchor Hyperties shows a very short description of the destination (on the bottom line of the screen), somewhat like the way most WWW browsers show the destination name.
In Hyperties all links lead to the first page of the destination node. (In Intermedia and World Wide Web the destination of a link may be a string within a node.) Also, Hyperties uses a table (database) of anchor-destination pairs. This means that the same phrase (anchor), occurring in different nodes, must always lead to the same destination node. This makes authoring easier, but makes the system less flexible. In the World Wide Web for instance, it is common (but bad) practice to write that more detailed information is here, where here is an anchor which must lead to a different node depending on where it occurs.
The simplistic design was inspired by the initial use of Hyperties as an interface for introductory information bases for museums. To keep the interface attractive it has been made possible to display color graphics (depending on the type of screen).
Hyperties is also being developed further as a research prototype on Unix workstations (in particular on Suns with the NeWS window system). While the PC version uses the entire screen to display a single node the research version can display two nodes side by side on the (larger) workstation's screen.
The (non-WWW) hypertext market is now dominated by Storyspace, available for Macintosh and Windows.