Medienästhetik der Schrift

Aus: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/hypertext-history/

Hypertext Editing System (1967) and FRESS (1968)

Even though Xanadu was not even partly implemented until recently, hypertext systems were built at Brown University in the 1960s under the leadership of Andries van Dam. The Hypertext Editing System built in 1967 was the world's first working hypertext system. It ran in a 128K memory partition on a small IBM/360 mainframe and was funded by an IBM research contract.

After the Hypertext Editing System was finished as a research project at Brown University, IBM sold it to the Houston Manned Spacecraft Center, where it was actually used to produce documentation for the Apollo missions.

The second hypertext system was FRESS (File Retrieval and Editing System), which was done at Brown University in 1968 as a follow-up to the Hypertext Editing System and was also implemented on an IBM mainframe. Because of this extremely stable platform, it was actually possible to run a demonstration of this code, more than twenty years old, at the 1989 ACM Hypertext conference.

Both these early hypertext systems had the basic hypertext functionality of linking and jumping to other documents, but most of their user interface was text-based and required indirect user specification of the jumps.

Brown University has been a major player in the hypertext field ever since, with its most prominent effort being the development of the Intermedia system (discussed further later in this chapter).