Don't Dream It, See It

Abstract

Here we revisit hypertexts as found before the Web became its current established form. One such system from that time is 'Microcosm', which was initially developed at the University of Southampton in UK from the late-1980s to the late-1990s. Microcosm grew out of experiments with videodisc technology and Hypercard by Southampton's Multimedia Research Group, under Wendy Hall. This work was part of the challenge of creating an interactive digital version of the Mountbatten Archive [17] that the University had recently acquired. By 1988, that earlier work had grown into the 'Microcosm' hypertext system in 1988 [15, p.xiii]. The first formal technical description came in a publication at ECHT'90 [9], whilst the results of teaching using Microcosm were reported on the next year [14]. The original system ran as a discrete app on the Windows OS and was not networked. Although the latter had been an original design intent [15, p.133] limitations of the erstwhile Windows platform meant the networked aspects could not be implemented [15, p.139]. An interesting feature of Microcosm was that it offered ways to hook into the window tool bars of then-current MS Office, to assist with the creation of links (though copies of the code for these extensions have yet to be re-discovered). As well as providing a means to view data via hypertext links, Microcosm allowed its users to make discrete data 'applications'. That might be a teaching course or a company knowledge base. Once authored, an application could be distributed for use by any user with a Microcosm installation. The client could install multiple applications for different, discrete, use. Despite constraints on early networking plans, the Microcosm team were active in the Open Hypertext System concept (ECHT'92[6], ECHT'94[7]). Such ideas offered the potential for sharing information between different hypertext systems, as use across different systems as opposed to sharing between same system clients was a general limitation at that time. From its initial academic beginnings, the program was spun out from the University into a commercial company (Multicosm Ltd), which sold the program to both public and private sector clients as well as for academic use. The most complete coverage of Microcosm's story is in the 1996 book Rethinking Hypermedia: The Microcosm Approach [15], written when Microcosm was still an active product. A new, Microcosm 'TNG', version was proposed [10] [15, p.154] but whilst the company continued on with other products, work on the Microcosm program ceased towards the end of the 1990s. That last part of the story is, as yet, undocumented. Now some 25 years later, the most interesting aspects for today's viewer are Microcosm's linkbase stack and its ability to link into video at a time stamp, something unusual at that time. As was common in full hypertext systems pre-Web, Microcosm stored its links externally in a link base and not in the content. Microcosm leveraged that architecture by offering the ability to attach a number of discrete link bases, of both deliberately authored links or to generate calculated links from selected texted. By adjusting the ordering of the linkbases within the stack, the user experience could be varied in the way the active application responded. Meanwhile, the ability to define links targets on a discrete area of a running video might seem trivial now, but at the time was not a common feature, and reflected the project's multimedia roots.