Time Travel: A Live Demo of the Intermedia Hypertext System - Circa 1989

Abstract

In the late 1980s, before the WWW came to be, hypertext was a hot new field. Brown University's Institute for Information and Scholarship (IRIS) developed Intermedia, a networked, multiuser, multi application hypermedia system that was well-known and oft demoed at conferences (and used by the speaker for his keynote at Hypertext '89). Its most lasting contribution has been the speaker's coining of the word "anchor" to represent the "sticky selection" that is the source or destination of a link within documents. Anchors generalized these link endpoints to include any media type. Intermedia's development began in 1985. Its paradigm was the integration of bi-directional hypermedia links between different applications in what was then the graphical desktop interface introduced by Apple only a year earlier. Intermedia had many features, some of which have since become mainstream -- anchors (links to a span of text or a set of objects, rather than just a point), full-text indexing, dictionary lookup, links in different media type -- and some still yet to be common in web browser-based systems-- such as bi-directional links, integrated annotation capabilities, tracking of anchors in edited documents, and simultaneous linking by multiple individuals across the network. Two years ago, the Computer History Museum asked if the speaker could resurrect Intermedia to show at the celebration of the 50th Anniversary of the Doug Engelbart's Mother-of-All-Demos. It was believed that all of the backup disks and tapes had deteriorated, but through the intervention of the hypertext gods, a disk was found that worked and had a full-installation of Intermedia, along with demo files -- including the Hypertext '89 keynote content. The speaker procured some Macintosh IIci machines, monitors, mice, and keyboards on eBay and amazingly, Intermedia ran. In this presentation, you will see a fully-operational hypermedia system running quite nicely on a computer that is 250,000 times slower than today's high-end PCs.