I know hypertext has been around since the 60s. Was Berners-Lee the first person who ever thought of fusing the Net and hypertext together, or was his software just the first of its kind that became popular?
Gopher was sort of similar.
yeah Gopher if done well was as functional as hypertext.
Gopher did have structure so it was more uniform and that could be better.
As I recall it, Gopher was kind of “reversed” compared to the WWW. Gopher sites were primarily a list of links that could be annotated with (possibly lengthy) textual descriptions, while WWW sites were primarily a free-from document that might have some embedded links.
Before the Internet, the PLATO system, and more specifically its authoring language TUTOR, had strong support for hypertext. I wrote some stuff myself using it. I used it 1974 - 1977, but hypertext predated this.
text markup languages have been around for decades. They make boards like the SDMB work. [/U.] is a tag that tell the computer to underline text.
We had text markup languages on every mainframe that I used. Long, long before the Internet. HTML is more advanced but based on the same ideas.
Cool story, bro.
I was referring to GML and SGML. GML has been around since 1969 and I used in the early 80’s… LinuxDoc is another great markup text tool.
Cite
I think the OP is asking which text markup system was the first to allow hyperlinks over the network (i.e. allowed you to mark up a word as a link to another document on a server).
Ok, I thought he was referring to formatting text with a markup language. The web would be a very ugly place without formatted pages.
links in documents came later. I can recall going to FTP sites for documents. Nothing was linked. It was just an index of files to dl. The individual related files were organized in zip files.
My experience in the late 80s was someone gave you an ftp address and you went there are got what you wanted. Then a web crawler called archie came around that indexed ftp sites and was searchable. (Incidentally, it was a master’s project by a McGill grad student.) Archie was followed by veronica and others. Then came the web.
Veronica was a search engine for Gopher sites.
The text of the original proposal. Seems to me he came up with an idea for a one-stop type distributed scheme based on hypertext that would enable the crosslink of the various existing information management tools and resources, and was able to push it forward and implement it.
One of those things that *after *it’s done you go :smack: right, why did I not make that next step, and figure that sooner or later someone would have come up with it, but it was this guy and his team who did so in this time and place.
Of course, then proceeding to put his solution in the public domain with no demand for patent royalties probably helped its widespread adoption a lot.
Ted Nelson (son of Celeste Holm!) proposed his Project Xanadu in 1960, consisting of text documents with versioning and hyperlinks and per-click payments. According to Wikipedia, it’s the “longest-running vaporware story in history”. I saw him speak about 1984 and he was still proposing it as the ultimate computer system.
I vaguely remember doing something like this in the early 90s, and trying to convince my employer that it was useful–unsuccessfully. It took the web to change his mind.
Was it completely impossible to search the Internet before Archie, or could you still do it in the 80s if you knew how to write the correct code to scour the FTP universe?
I was a PLATO programmer from 80 to 84 or so. I really don’t remember hypertext support in TUTOR. PLATO was great, for its time, with lots of features finding its way into the internetz, but hypertext it really didn’t have.
BTW - if you want to play on PLATO again - try http://www.cyber1.org/ - they have a client you can download, and you can play Empire again!