[Up- WWW theory] [Map] [Prior] [Robot Wisdom home page]
(I've tried to take a very broad view of what hypertext includes, and to
find interesting pages to link it to. Suggestions and corrections are welcome.)
The Age of Writing (every book is handwritten, with an individual 'voice')
c3000BCE: papyrus scrolls, clay tablets refer to earlier ones? c1700BCE: phonetic alphabets in mideast c335BCE: Aristotle surveys human knowledge c300BCE: Alexandria Library project innovates xrefs and annotations c100: first books in 'codex' form; uppercase letterforms established c700: lowercase letterforms established c900: "1001 Arabian Nights" frames stories within stories within stories 1140: Gratian's "Decretum" collates 3800 divergent Catholic texts c1300: Kabbalists and Ramon Llull explore text combinatorics
The Age of Printing (the illusion of an objective voice)
1455: Gutenberg's Bible using moveable type c1500: title pages, prefaces grow out of publishers' colophons ?: page numbering? ?: punctuation and English spelling standardized 1725: Vico's "New Science" calls for universal thesaurus of concepts 1746-55: Samuel Johnson's Dictionary of English 1759: Sterne's "Tristram Shandy" makes form the center of a novel 1768: Encyclopedia Britannica surveys all knowledge
The Age of Electricity (exploring an infinitely impressionable medium)
1837: Morse Code digitizes alphabet 1839: Panizzi's cataloguing code for British Museum 1852: Roget's Thesaurus digitizes word-meanings 1873: Dewey Decimal System digitizes topic-meanings 1890: Hollerith's punched-card computer 1895: Cathode-ray tube (CRT) 1939: Joyce's "Finnegans Wake" uses puns to implement diverging plotlines 1940: First electronic computers in US, UK, and Germany 1941: Borges's story "Garden of the Forking Paths" (tribute to Joyce's FW?)
The Era of Big Iron (allowing coarse projections of human reason)
1945: Vannevar Bush proposes Memex; ENIAC completed 1948: Bardeen, Brattain, and Shockley create first transistor 1954: Skinner's behaviorism inspires 'programmed learning' approach 1957: ARPA formed in response to Sputnik 1960: "Spacewar" first videogame on PDP-1 at MIT 1960: Donald Bitzer initiates PLATO computer-based education project 1962: Nabokov's "Pale Fire" disguises novel as footnotes to a long poem 1963: Doug Engelbart's "A Conceptual Framework" 1963: Quillian lays AI groundwork for semantic nets 1963: ASCII 7-bit standard digitizes alphabet; first 'teletext' 1964: McLuhan's "Understanding Media" postulates global village 1965: Ted Nelson coins the term "hypertext"; Englebart invents the mouse 1966: Cortazar's "Hopscotch" published-- multi-path novel 1968: Englebart's "Augment/NLS" hypertext sys; Brown's HES (Nelson & van Dam) 1968: Alan Kay's "DynaBook" cardboard prototype; SCRIPT?
The Network Era (a radically new dimension in human communication)
1969: ARPANET; Ritchie & Thompson's UNIX operating system 1969: FRESS developed at Brown U 1969: Ernst, Newell & Simon's General Problem Solver 1971: Intel 4004 microprocessor 1972: Tomlinson invents email 1972: ZOG development begins at Carnegie Mellon (distributed hypertext) 1973: PLATO Notes early groupware; Waterloo Script? 1974: Ted Nelson's "Computer Lib/Dream Machines" 1974: TCP proposed by Cerf and Kahn 1974: Minsky reifies the 'frame' as data structure for AI 1976: Don Woods adds fantasy to Wm Crowther's '72 cave adventure -> 1st IF 1976: TROFF?; Michael Shrayer writes Electric Pencil for Altair ?: Pong
The Micro Era (personalized computing brings a burst of innovation)
1977: Apple ][ personal computer 1977: UUCP networked-copy program distributed with Unix 1978: First BBS created by Ward Christensen and Randy Suess 1978: MIT's "Aspen Movie Map" hypermedia videodisc 1979: Truscott & Bellovin's Usenet news; Bartle & Trubshaw first MUD ?1979: choose-your-own-adventure books 1979: WordStar word processing software 1980: Infocom ports Zork to the Apple ?: Atari's PacMan 1981: Xerox debuts the Star, with mouse and windows 1981/2/3: Development-- KMS (Knowledge Sys.)/ Guide (U Kent)/ TIES (U Md) 1981: Nelson's "Literary Machines"- Xanadu, centralized hypertext archive 1981: French Telecom pioneers nationwide Minitel network 1982: Netnews distributes 500 msgs/day to 100 sites in <100 newsgroups 1983: TCP/IP replaces NCP, defines "Internet" 1983: Randall Trigg's PhD on hypertext "TEXTNET" at U of Maryland ?: Doug Adams translates "Hitchhiker's Guide" for Infocom
The WYSIWYG Era (conflicting standards for esthetic computation)
1984: Apple Macintosh bundled w/WYSIWYG word processor MacWrite 1984: Gibson coins 'cyberspace' in "Neuromancer" 1984: Knuth's "Literate Programming", TeX 1984: Guide implemented commercially by Office Workstations 1984/5/6: Devel-- NoteCards (Xerox)/ Intermedia (BrownU)/ Writing Env. (UNC) 1984: Doug Lenat begins Cyc project at MCC (common sense -> logic) 1984: DNS Domain Name Server, Internet hosts break 1000 1985: Adobe Postscript; CD-ROMs; Windows 1.0 [Windows Help?] 1985: The WELL offers Silicon Valley a community BBS 1985: Janet Walker creates Symbolics "Document Examiner" 1986: Goldfarb's SGML standard adopted 1986: NSFnet backbone opens Internet access to all; NNTP speeds netnews
The Hypertext Era (personal hypertext generates excitement)
1987: Apple bundles HyperCard with every Macintosh 1987: Hypertext '87 Workshop held in North Carolina 1987: Conklin's "Hypertext: An Introduction and Survey" 1987: Internet hosts break 10,000; 1000 news msgs/day in 300 groups ?: Wayne Davison adds threading to rn -> "trn" 1989: Tim Berners-Lee proposes WorldWide Web 1989: 100,000 Internet hosts; ?4,000 news msgs/day in ?500 newsgroups 1989: Autodesk funds Xanadu project development (dropped 1992) 1989: IBM's LinkWay & IRIS Intermedia 3.0 released commercially 1989: Schneiderman & Kearsley's "Hypertext Hands-On"; Joyce's "Afternoon" 1990: ECHT (European Conference on Hypertext) 1990: HTML; Deutsch, Emtage, & Heelan's Archie; Lotus Notes? 1991: Sony's Data Discman; Franklin's Electronic Bible 1991: Lindner & McCahill's Gopher; Kahle's WAIS
The WWWeb Era (global hypertext with minimal imposed structure)
1992: CERN ?releases WWWeb [http?] 1992: 1,000,000 Internet hosts; 10,000 news msgs/day in ?1000 newsgroups 1992: Ed Krol's "Whole Internet Guide" is a bestseller 1992: alt.hypertext newsgroup created 1993: Int'l Wrkshp on Hypermedia & Hypertext Standards, Amsterdam (April) 1993: NCSA Mosaic 1.0 for X Windows (June) 1993: WWW dvlprs conf, Cambridge MA (August); Hypertext Conf, Seattle (Nov) 1993: "A Hard Day's Night" CD-ROM from Voyager; US White House on WWWeb 1993: "Myst" by Robyn and Rand Miller, "Doom" by ID released 1994: WWWeb byte-traffic passes Gopher byte-traffic on NSFnet (March) 1994: Confs: Geneva, Intl WWW; Vancvr, Ed Multimed; Edinbrgh, Hypermed Tech 1994: Clark & Andreessen form Mosaic (-> Netscape), release 1st beta
The Netscape Era (NHTML evolution driven largely by user-gee-whiz factor)
1995: ?10 million Internet hosts; ??250,000 news msgs/day in ?10,000 newsgroups ?1995: Lycos WWWeb search engine; Yahoo WWWeb category index 1995: Comp.infosystems.www.*. reorg creates 18 groups; alt.culture.www 1995: Netscape IPO goes stratospheric, Wall Street goes nuts for the Net 1995: Java makes applets net-portable 1995: DEC's Altavista search engine word-indexes 15 million pages (Dec) 1996: 24 Hours in Cyberspace documentary project (Feb 8?) 1996: US telecom bill outlaws indecency on Net, immediate court challenges
[added 1 Nov 1998:]
The Age of Hype (buzzword-of-the-month usually flops)
1997-1998: push, network computer, Java, portal, community, XML, etc
Acknowledgments to the Electronic Labyrinth timeline, the Hypermedia Timeline, pre-1952 digital computing timeline, and Hobbes Internet Timeline. (The last of these drives home for me how little I can judge the relative importance of the many Internet technical developments...)
Thanks: Doug Jones, Adam Thornton, Richard Creed
Web-design pages:
main :
academia :
info-design :
adding value :
resource-pages :
lessons-learned :
best-worst :
plugging leaks
Special topics:
surfing-skills :
url-hacking :
open content :
semantics :
pagelength :
linktext :
startpages :
bookmarklets :
weblogging :
colors :
autobiographical pages :
thumbnail-graphics :
web-video :
timeline of hypertext
Anti-XML/W3C/etc:
structure-myth :
page-parsing :
firstcut-parser :
html-history :
semantic web
Design prototypes:
topical portal :
dense-content faq :
annotated lit :
random-access lit-summary :
poetry sampler :
gossipy history :
author-resources :
hyperlinked-timeline :
horizontal-timeslice :
web-dossier
Website-resource pages:
RobotWisdom.com :
Altavista.com :
1911encyclopedia.com :
Google.com :
IMDb.com :
Perseus.org :
Salon.com :
Yahoo.com
Older stuff:
design-lab :
design-checklist :
HyperTerrorist :
design-theory :
design cog-sci
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