Reflections on a Half-Century of Hypertext

Abstract

2019 marks not only the 30th anniversary of the falling of the Berlin Wall, but also the 50th anniversaries of equally momentous events of 1968-1969 in the US and elsewhere. Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy were assassinated. Hippie flower power and the closely related anti-Vietnam movement were socio-political revolutions. In Europe, 2019 marks the 100th anniversary of the end of the war to end all wars and the 75th anniversary of D-Day. Counterpointing this societal turmoil, technology gave us hope. Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the moon. Doug Engelbart and his team presented the Mother of All Demos of NLS at the '68 Fall Joint Computer Conference. Ivan Sutherland's pioneering Sketchpad (that demo'd interactive graphics in 1963) and Engelbart's NLS demo were two landmark events that were early examples of interactive computing in an era of batch computation. Interactive computing on time-sharing systems, combined with microminiaturization, would lead more than a decade later to the birth of the personal computer. It caused a revolution in the dominant model of computing that was centered on large mainframes and minicomputers used for science and engineering, finance and commerce. Interactive computing based on computer graphics and its use in hypermedia systems characterizes most of my research career. In 2019, it is difficult to remember the impact that interaction-based information structuring and sharing had on society; it certainly shaped my research career. In this presentation, I will reflect on the development of five decades of hypermedia systems and will demo three systems that have been highlights of my journey in hyperland. First, I'll show our FRESS hypertext system (still running 50-year old assembly code!), with the database of poetry used by a class of English students in 1976 in what is arguably the first online scholarly community. Next, I will demo our TAG (Touch Art Gallery) used by the Nobel Foundation a few years ago for a traveling exhibition on Alfred Nobel and all the Nobel Laureates. Finally, I'll interweave the hypertext-centric parts of my talk with some source material stored in an unbounded 2D workspace, using our current hypermedia system Dash, which is still under development and in an early but already useful state. These systems will be presented in the context of the research trends that led, ultimately, to the interconnected society in which we live. All of us working on our first hypertext systems in the '60s understood the potential of this technology. What I did not predict is that 50 years later the revolution in human-centered computing would remain far too unfinished in terms of its positive societal impact. Indeed, that impact and utility are increasingly in jeopardy from a variety of forces, both economic and political. I will close with some thoughts on both deliberately designed and unanticipated societal issues of social media that I feel we technologists must urgently help address.