Word: hypertexts
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...This is "hypertext," and it was hardly new. The idea was outlined by Vannevar Bush in 1945 and envisioned as an appendage to the brain. Berners-Lee explains the brainlike structure of hypertext by reference to his cup of coffee. "If instead of coffee I'd brought in lilac," he says, sitting in a conference room in M.I.T.'s computer-science lab, "you'd have a strong association between the laboratory for computer science and lilac. You could walk by a lilac bush and be brought back to the laboratory." My brain would do this transporting via interlinked neurons...
...trouble with most hypertext systems, as of the late 1980s, was that they were in one sense unlike the brain. They had a centralized database that kept track of all the links so that if a document was deleted, all links to it from other documents could be erased; that way there are no "dangling links"--no arrows pointing to nothing, no mouse-clicks leading nowhere. When Berners-Lee attended hypertext exhibits and asked designers whether they could make their systems worldwide, they often said no, citing this need for a clearinghouse. Finally, "I realized that this dangling-link thing...
...later, the world had changed. The Internet, though still unknown to the public, was now firmly rooted. It was essentially a bare-bones infrastructure, a trellis of empty pipes. There were ways to retrieve data, but no really easy ways, and certainly nothing with the intuitive, neural structure of hypertext...
Until the money flows, however, online media remains a grand experiment that explores how new-media tools can redefine communication--hypertext that links words to stories and information all over the world, for instance, and message boards that flow directly out of daily stories. "The Net is a much freer medium than the traditional press right now, and people are intoxicated by it," says media critic Jon Katz, who writes a column for HotWired's Netizen www.netizen.com) Katz, whose career has included stints at the Philadelphia Inquirer and Boston Globe, says that when he used to finish writing a print...
...where exactly does this terse, abbreviated e-mail language originate? Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) is replete with TLAs (three letter acronyms) and reductive sound-bite talk and one may inevitably spot CS 50 students chuckling in the computer lab while Unix illiterates struggle with the fluorescent pink HASCS pocket dictionary. Technology is the wave of the future, they seem to say, either ride it, or get dunked...