HYPERTEXT

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HYPERTEXT

The origin of the concept of hypertext is
normally associated with an article published in
1945 by Vannevar Bush "As we may think" , while
the term itself was coined by Theodore Nelson in
the early sixties, and practical implementations
of the concept did not begin to appear till the
middle eighties, with the World Wide Web as the
popular breakthrough in the nineties. From
Hypertext concepts A Historical
Perspective http//akira.ruc.dk/new/CommCourse/H
ypertext.PDF
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HYPERTEXT

What Vannevar Bush suggested in his conception
of the Memex was a principle of document
organisation that reflected the relationship
between the documents as perceived by the user,
that is the individual scientist, scholar,
engineer, lawyer, physician etc. The
relationship ought to be associative rather than
systematic In 1945 no computer existed that
could handle such a job, and Vannevar Bush based
his ideas on such technologies as
microphotography, tape recorders,
teletypewriters, photocells, cathode ray tubes
and mechanical calculators The Memex was
strictly a device for individual use - a sort of
mechanized private file and library. The memex
was never built. It was a daring vision but quite
impractical with the technology Bush had in
mind From Hypertext concepts A Historical
Perspective http//akira.ruc.dk/new/CommCourse/H
ypertext.PDF
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HYPERTEXT

Theodore Nelson in 1972, claims that Vannevar
Bush is not describing a new form of "information
retrieval", as has often been said, but the
principles of Hypertext. In fact, Theodore Nelson
points out.. "Bush rejected indexing and
discussed instead new forms of interwoven
documents." Vannevar Bush talks of "trails"
obviously meaning an interlinked set of
"documents, documents excerpts, and comments upon
them" and "Such non-sequential or complex text
structures we may call 'hypertetexts... Fro
m Hypertext concepts A Historical
Perspective http//akira.ruc.dk/new/CommCourse/H
ypertext.PDF
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HYPERTEXT

Nelsons Xanadu expressed a daring vision, equal
to the vision of Memex, of storing everything
that anybody has ever written, in electronic
form, accessible via a computer, and having users
create links between them in an associative
manner From Hypertext concepts A
Historical Perspective http//akira.ruc.dk/new/C
ommCourse/Hypertext.PDF
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HYPERTEXT

"Hypertext is non-sequential writing. ... A
link is simply a connection between parts of text
or other material. It is put in by a human. Links
are made by individuals as pathways for the
readers exploration thus they are parts of the
actual document, part of the writing. ... The
link facility gives us much more than the
attachment of mere odds and ends. It permits
fully non-sequential writing, or hypertext. This
simple facility -- the jump-link capability --
leads immediately to all sorts of new text forms
for scholarship, for teaching, for fiction, for
hyper-poetry. This makes possible a certain
free-form serendipitous browsing. Ted Nelson
Literary Machines. 1981. From Hypertext
concepts A Historical Perspective http//akira.r
uc.dk/new/CommCourse/Hypertext.PDF