prior-art-dept.: The hierarchical hypermedia world of Hyper-G

It's time for another entry in the Prior Art Department and today we'll consider a forgotten yet still extant sidebar of the early 1990s Internet. If you had Internet access at home back then, it was almost certainly dialup modem (like I did); only the filthy rich had T1 lines or ISDN. Moreover, from a user perspective, the hosts you connected to were their own universe. Things may have originated elsewhere, but everything on the host you connected to was a local copy: the mail you received, the files you could access, the posts you could read. Exceptional circumstances like NFS notwithstanding, what you could see and access was local — it didn't point somewhere else.

Around this time, however, was when sites started referencing other sites, much like the expulsion from Eden. In 1990 both HYTELNET and Archie appeared, which were early search engines for Telnet and FTP resources. Since they relied on accurate information about sites they didn't control, both of them had to regularly update their databases. Gopher, when it emerged in 1991, consciously tried to be a friendlier FTP by presenting files and resources hung from a hierarchy of menus, which could even point to menus on other hosts. That meant you didn't have to locally mirror a service to point people at it, but if the referenced menu was relocated or removed, the link to it was broken and the reference's one-way nature meant there was no automated way to trace back and fix it. And then there was that new World Wide Web thing introduced to the public in 1993: a powerful soup of media and hypertext with links that could point to nearly anything, but they were unidirectional as well, and the sheer number even in modest documents could quickly overwhelm users in a rapidly expanding environment. Not for nothing was the term "linkrot" first attested around 1996, as well as how disoriented a user might get following even perfectly valid links down a seemingly infinite rabbithole.

Of course, other technically-minded folks had long been aware of the problem, and as early as 1989 an academic team in Austria was already trying to attack the problem of "access to all kinds of information one can think of." In this world, documents and media resources could be associated together into a defined hierarchy, the relationships between them were discoverable and bidirectional, and systems were searchable by design. Links could be in anything, not just text. Clients could log into servers or be anonymous, logged-in users could post content, and in the background servers could talk to other servers to let them know what changes had occurred so they could synchronize references. Along the way, as new information resources via WAIS, Gopher and the Web started to appear, their content could also be brought into these servers to form a unified whole. This system was Hyper-G, and we'll demonstrate it — on period-correct classic RISC hardware, as we do — and provide the software so you can too.

prior-art-dept.: ProleText, encoding HTML before Markdown (and a modern reimplementation)

Steven P. Spackman allegedly once observed that "flat text is just never what you want." Which, I guess, is true: half the historical advances in computing have come from figuring out ways to tart up plain text, whether embedding control codes or out-of-band styling or in-band markup. However, with the exception of out-of-band styling (I always liked the Macintosh text file formats that kept the text in the data fork and the styling in a resource), you still needed to parse the file or at best you'd get blocks of text separated by gobbledygook. Enhanced text formats like Markdown were thus designed to make cognitive sense to human eyes without further parsing — but also encoding sufficient metadata to facilitate improved ways of rendering the document.

Markdown circa 2004 has displaced most of the others today, but it explicitly never claimed to be the first such human-readable format; indeed, AsciiDoc predates it by about two years, reStructuredText a year before that and MakeDoc about a year before that. For that matter, some of the concepts popularized in Markdown might not have existed at all were it not for earlier ancestors like 2002's Textile.

But a forgotten rich text language predates most of these, with the interesting property in that much of the markup is encoded using trailing whitespace, almost a fusion of in-band and out-of-band styling systems. If the whitespace is munged, it's largely just a text document (like those particular Mac files if you pass along only the data fork); but if it passes through intact, an intelligent converter can use attributes encoded in the whitespace to style it into HTML. That system is ProleText.

prior-art-dept.: 5 letter words (Jim Butterfield's Jotto)

I mentioned the Wordle craze, including the extant ports to the Commodore 64, in our KIMdle sorta-Wordle for the KIM-1. But the Commodore 64, and I suspect this was actually a PET game originally, had a five-letter word game before that. Jim Butterfield's port of the 1955 Jotto board game isn't Wordle — it tells you merely how many letters matched — but it's undeniably an ancestor concept. Jotto appears in the Commodore 64 user's guide on page 145 and is believed to be public domain. It is reproduced in its entirety in this scanned image.

prior-art-dept.: OWL Guide, early hypertext, and "replacing" the Web

I've been building up a few of these entries in my head as I run across things, so this will be the first of a recurring series of "prior art": technologies and ideas we use today that had earlier, different paths and implementations. For this inagural entry we'll be looking at OWL Guide, an early hypertext system for the Macintosh, and contrasting it with HTML and the modern Web.

Of course, hypertext didn't start with the microcomputer; one of the earliest document-oriented forms (as opposed to card- or frame-oriented like HyperCard or KMS, as well as other concepts) was the 1967 Hypertext Editing System, running on a partition on an IBM System/360 Model 50, contemporary with the baroque but much celebrated oN-Line System which formed the basis for the 1968 Mother of All Demos. However, the microcomputer was where it started to gain steam, with early text-only implementations like the DOS-based 1983 PhotoQuery, which became TIES in 1984. TIES' key innovation was advancing the convention that the text itself contained the links embedded within it, rather than navigating using external numbered menus, codes, icons or other gadgets. (TIES later evolved into HyperTIES, which in 1988 introduced early implementations of imagemaps and style sheets using its own "HTML" [HyperTIES Markup Language] for screen design, also based on SGML. HyperTIES was credited as the first instance where hyperlinks are blue.)

This was a natural fit for GUIs, and hypertext/hypermedia flourished on the early Macintosh. Naturally everyone remembers HyperCard and its various clones, the archetype (but not the prototype) of card-based hypermedia, but one of the earliest hypertext systems on any desktop computer was OWL Guide for the Mac, dating to 1986.