Amaral, Kimberly. _Hypertext and Writing_. https://www.whoi.edu/science/B/people/kamaral/hypertext.html. Accessed 15 Feb. 2025. https://www.whoi.edu/science/B/people/kamaral/hypertext.html [[../writing/Bibliography|Bibliography]] > The idea behind hypermedia is not a new one. In fact, 50 years ago Vannevar Bush, the head of the Office of Scientific Research and Development during World War II, proposed a method of cataloguing and retrieving information prophetically like today's hypermedia. > > His "memex" machine would use a series of gears where a reader could sit at a desk and call up information--both text and pictures--associatively. This, argued Bush, is how the mind really works… "The human mind…operates by association. With one item in its grasp, it snaps instantly to the next that is suggested by the association of thoughts, in accordance with some intricate web of trails carried by the cells of the brain.." (["Classic Technology: As We May Think."](http://www.acs.umassd.edu/WebWorkshop/aswemaythink.html) _Atlantic Monthly._ July 1945. Reprinted November, 1994.) > > Since then, researchers have carried on the ideals of hypertext in a digital arena. Doug Engelbart was the first to be influenced by Bush's concepts of associative links and browsing in the early 1960s (_Byte,_ 10/88). His system, Augment, stores information in a sophisticated hierarchical structure allowing non-hierarchical branching. To make viewing easier and increase user speed, he also developed the "mouse" and viewing filters. > > But it was Ted Nelson who coined the term "hypertext" over 29 years ago to mean non-sequential writing. His publishing system released in 1989, Xanadu, attempted to hold the world's literary treasures under one roof. It interconnected linked electronic documents and other forms of media, such as movies, audio, and graphics. > > Other hypertext systems and "browsers" have since been created, one of the most popular being Macintosh's HyperCard. While all of these work well self-sufficiently, there still wasn't a universal system of exchanging information freely and making links between it. > > That was, until Switzerland's high-energy physics laboratory CERN developed the World Wide Web, the skeleton of computer networks upon which all on-line information can be placed. The U.S.'s decentralized networks--designed to survive a nuclear attack--were created roughly a quarter-century ago for researchers in the defense industry. > > And in 1993, the National Center for Computing Applications (NCSA) released the software Mosaic, a graphical information "browser," that allowed users to pleasurably view all the information now available on the network. > because the author is no longer in control over what path a reader will take, hypertext creates an environment for independent critical thinking. In a sense, the readers are also the "writers" of the material, by making connections themselves. And making those connections on their own, pulling together different bits of information and creating a whole new meaning, entails critical thinking. ^d4f973 > There is that inherent danger--that your reader can become so side-tracked with ancillary information that they lose interest in or even track of where they begun. Paradoxically, it is also the joy of perusing information in hypertext. Gary Wolf, in his _Wired_ article (10/94) "Why I Dig Mosaic," shares his "vertigo" experience: > > "Many documents are linked into the NCSA demo page, which is full of links leading out into the Web. I scanned down the lines of gray text and selected a blue link that had nothing to do with my official mission: 'An experiment in hypermedia publishing: excerpts and audio from a book reading by author Paul Kafka of his novel LOVE Enter,' it said. This I hoped, would be a nice breather... > > Before finding out, I glanced at the rest of the document, and it was then that I began to experience the vertigo of Net travel. On the lower parts of the page were abstracts of Paul's scientific papers, some co-authored with Benjamin Grinstein... > > It was a type of voyeurism, yes, but it was less like peeking into a person's window and more like dropping in on a small seminar with a cloak of invisibility. > > One thing it was not like: it was not like being in a library. The whole experience gave an intense illusion, not of information, but of personality. I had been treating the ether as a kind of data repository and I suddenly found myself in the confines of a scientist's study, complete with family pictures... > > It was late. I'd been in Paul Mende's life for an hour. I turned the computer off. It was not until this morning that I remembered I had never made it back to CERN." > > So the dangers of disorientation are not always so devastating for the reader. It simply means that something has caught their attention--just not the same document they began with. ^1104da