History of hypertext and hypermedia

When one looks at the popular literature it appears that hypertext is an invention of the late 80's, which became very popular in the 90's. The introduction of Guide in 1986, HyperCard in 1987 and the first ACM Conference on Hypertext, also in 1987, are indeed the first clear signs that a whole new research and development area was born. World Wide Web, invented by Tim Berners Lee at CERN in 1989, and made popular by Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina from NCSA in 1992 by means of the Mosaic for X browser, has really pushed hypertext into the mass market. However, the first hypertext ideas and developments are much older, older in fact than most other phenomena in computer science.

The following list marks some major events in the history of hypertext:

1945    Vannevar Bush proposes Memex in his article "As We May Think".
1965 Ted Nelson introduces Xanadu and coins the term hypertext.
1967 Andries van Dam develops the Hypertext Editing System at Brown University, followed by the introduction of FRESS in 1968.
1968 Doug Engelbart gives a demo of NLS, a part of the Augment project, started in 1962.
1975 A team at CMU, headed by Robertson, develops the ZOG system, which later becomes KMS.
1978 A team at MIT, headed by Andrew Lippman, develops the Aspen Movie Map, the first true example of a multimedia application including videodisk.
1985 Janet Walker develops the Symbolics Document Examiner, the first hypertext system used by "real" customers.
1985 Several other hypertext systems are announced, including NoteCards from Xerox, and Intermedia from Brown University.
1986 OWL introduces Guide for the Macintosh, the first widely available hypertext system, based on the Unix Guide system, developed by Peter Brown at the University of Kent.
1987 Apple delivers HyperCard free with every Macintosh.
1987 The ACM organizes the first Conference on Hypertext.
The list stops here, not because the development of the field would have stalled after 1987, but because the new developments since 1987 are too numerous to name all of them. However, one development which must be mentioned is the introduction of the World Wide Web, a freely accessible distributed hypertext, for which several freely available user-interfaces exist, and through which this course is being made available.

Before moving on to other chapters, please complete a small test on the history of hypertext.