Belinda Barnet is Lecturer in Media and Communications at Swinburne University, Melbourne. Prior to her appointment at Swinburne, she worked at Ericsson Australia, where she managed the development of 3G mobile content services. Belinda did her PhD on the history of hypertext at the University of New South Wales, and has research interests in digital media, the philosophy of technology, the history of technology and the mobile internet. She is currently looking for a publisher for her book on the history of hypertext and hypermedia.
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This article traces the development of two important hypertext systems in the history of computing, and the new paradigms they created: the Hypertext Editing System (HES) and the File Retrieval and Editing System (FRESS). HES was the world's first word processor to run on commercial equipment. It was also the first hypertext system that beginners could use, and pioneered many modern hypertext concepts for personal use. Although the idea of hypertext predates HES and FRESS, this article argues that these two systems were successful because they demonstrated hypertext to a sceptical public; they were both working prototypes.
Two of the earliest hypertext systems: HES and FRESS.
How does one tell the story of a computer system? As Larry Owens observes in his
essay on U.S. engineer Vannevar Bush, However the historian chooses to answer [this question],
utility must certainly play a role
witnessing
is fundamental to the evolution of technical artefacts; when
people see a machine in use, they can visualise the future of the object, connect it
with what they are doing in their own work, and connect it with other machines or
families of machines. An inventor is always and also a combinatory
genius,
selecting the best technical forms from a number of possibilities, and combining
these into a new artefact. What has been witnessed, evaluated and shown to work
constitutes the material for transfer.
This emphasis on prototypes and demonstrations is not just historically specific to
mid-twentieth century engineering discourse; it is also evident in contemporary new
media. Demonstrations have had an important, perhaps even central,
place in new media innovation. In some centres of new media, the traditional
knowledge-work dictum of
publish or perish
is replaced by demo or
die.
brutal
productive effect on its milieu is that it displaces
technical and financial limits and demonstrates what is possible. Sometimes, it
creates new paradigms.
In this article I will be tracing the development of two important prototype systems
in the history of hypertext, and the new paradigms they created: the Hypertext
Editing System (HES) and the File Retrieval and Editing System (FRESS). HES was the
world's first word processor to run on commercial equipment. It was also the first
hypertext system that beginners could use, and pioneered many modern hypertext
concepts for personal use. FRESS was Van Dam’s second attempt at a hypertext system,
and incorporated some ideas from another pioneering hypertext system from the 1960s,
Douglas Engelbart’s oN-Line System or NLS. HES and FRESS were developed at Brown
University in the late 1960s under the leadership of Andries Van Dam, Professor of
Computing Science at Brown. They were built at a time when computers, in large part,
were still seen primarily as tools for mathematical calculations, and computer
engineers had no business talking about text editing or interactivity. In an
interview with the author, Van Dam recalls that in the 1960s the whole idea of a user in an interactive computer loop was
still foreign to most people
The nonlinear
text, although the concept of a technical system designed to facilitate nonlinear
text can be traced back as far as 1910.under development
for fifty years hence; he has not produced a working
prototype or demo of Xanadu, although he did release some shells of code in 1999. To
Nelson’s dismay, and unfairly, it has consequently been hailed as the longest-running vaporware project in the history of
computing
Although Nelson was a co-designer of HES, there was a falling-out with the team
during its design and implementation, and Nelson stated in an interview with the
author that he was unhappy with the result
In this article I will argue that HES and FRESS, like Doug Engelbart’s landmark
system NLS, were influential on the history of hypertext and modern computing in
large part because they nonlinear writing
housed on a computer for years
without commercial successbecause Ted packages ideas in so much ... P.T. Barnum
salesmanship that people distrust it
There was a lot going on in the computing industry in the late 1960s. Time-sharing
had hit the industrydata processing.
Noting such changes, IBM began marketing to a full circle
of customers instead of the traditional military and industrial customers.
System/360, the mainframe on which HES was eventually built, was the first computer
built by IBM aimed at businesses and corporations — a wider and more domestic
market. There was a computing paradigm-shift going on.
But although businesses were adopting data processing
for the first time, the
world still saw computers as hardwired mathematics. Text was not
Van Dam recalls data
; it was something academics and journalists manipulated with pens
or typewriters,for scientists and engineers to solve serious
problems,
Van Dam recalls his then-VP for Finance saying, and he was told if you want to crank out papers you can damn well use a
typewriter
The idea was wacky even in the seventies, when we had it
working — real hypermedia, real groupware working
There was, however, an existing technology used for editing text on a computer; it
was called a line
or context
editor
Van Dam bumped into Nelson at the 1967 Spring Joint Computer Conference.He had nothing to show for this idea, no prototypes or work
in the sense that computer scientists talk about work — i.e., software,
algorithms
non-sequentially
Nelson's vision seduced me. I really loved his way of thinking
about writing, editing and annotating as a scholarly activity, and putting
tools together to support that. I hadn't heard of Engelbart. I hadn't heard of
Bush and Memex. So after meeting quite by accident at this computer conference,
and talking about what we each were doing, we somehow got onto the topic. I had
this wonderful graphics display...and I was working on various graphics
applications at the time. He talked me into working on the world’s first
hypertext system and that sounded cool.
Nelson went up there at his own expense
trivialisation
of his hypertext vision
But the HES team was trying to convince the world that the whole concept of handling
text on computers was not a waste of time and processing power. And the world knew
text handling as a paper-based thing. So not only were we
selling hypertext, but at the same time document processing, interaction. Many
people were still computing with cards,
recalls Van Dam web.
Perhaps more importantly, Van
Dam already had a vision of what his writing system should do, a vision based on
improving an existing human activity: creating and editing text for printed
documents.
The HES team designed a system for the composition and manipulation of manuscripts,
which could also be used as a reading machine to browse and query complex written
materials online. They did not wish to inflict line numbers on the user, or to make him program little changes in his data
ordinary
text editing as well as the more radical concept of non-sequential, online reading
and writing, they called the project the Hypertext
It was a hard sell. Van Dam recalls his chairman at the time saying, Why don't you stop with all this hypertext nonsense, and do
something serious?
to which Van Dam replied, Walter, I am doing something serious
had multiple reactions, from
cute
to I don’t get it
to my being in
a pissing contest to be allowed to use the university’s only mainframe computer
for this research with the then-VP for Finance
HES was set up on an IBM 360/50 with a 2250 display, and ran in a 128k partition of
the operating system that controlled the 512k of main memory available (there was a
complete timesharing system operating in another partition). The user sat facing a
12" by 12" screen, browsing through portions of arbitrarily sized texts. Original
text was entered directly via a keyboard, and the system itself was controlled by
pressing function keys, by pointing at the text with a light pen or via the keyboard
Our philosophical position [was] essentially that the writer
is engaged in very complicated pursuits, and that this work legitimately has a
freewheeling character... therefore it became our intent to provide the user
with unrestricted
spatial
options, and not to bother him with arbitrary
concerns that have no meaning in terms of the work being performed.strings
and allowed for edits
with arbitrary-length scope (for example, insert, delete, move, copy). This is in
contrast to NLS, which imposed a hierarchical tree structure of fixed-length lines or
statements upon all content; Engelbart used 4,000 character limits on his statements
to create a tighter, more controlled environment. These limitations meant that
Engelbart could implement more efficiently
The system itself was composed of text areas
which were of any length,
expanding and contracting automatically to accommodate material. These areas were
connected in two ways: by links and by branches. A link went from a point of
departure in one area (signified by an asterisk) to an entrance point in another, or
the same, area. Although the HES team used Ted Nelson's conception of a text link,
Doug Engelbart was incorporating the same idea into NLS independently, unbeknownst to
Van Dam, who wishes he had known about this work. I hadn’t heard
of Engelbart. I hadn’t heard of Bush and Memex. That came quite a bit
later,
Van Dam recalls.In fact, one of the things I was always pissed about is
that Ted never told me about Engelbart, even though he claimed he knew of
his work
The HES team employed human factors
techniques to design a system which guided
and explained the user's every move without loss of effectiveness Remember, we were doing hypertext at a time when there were no
word-processing systems either. The HES is one of the very first word
processors… I believe HES was the first document editor, specifically designed
for documents, to run on commercial equipment, and NLS was the first document
editor to run on a proprietary system, predating HES.
One of Van Dam’s tasks was to convince humanities scholars and writers that this was
a more efficient way of writing than using a pen or a typewriter. HES used a standard
32-key IBM function keyboard, but when they gave demos to writers in the late 1960s
whose business was words, not engineering, they would freak out
over all the
buttons I made a plastic overlay which I essentially used to cover up
all but five of the editing buttons: insert, delete, move, copy and jump. Then
we would do an entire demo for half an hour or so with that … and then we would
play peek-a-boo, strip off the first overlay, and lo and behold, there was
another row of function keys.
In early 1968 HES did the rounds of a number of large customers for IBM equipment, for example,
The best I ever got was from people like Time and Time-Life and the New York Times who said this is terrific technology, but we’re not going to get journalists typing on computer keyboards for the foreseeable future.
In late 1968, Van Dam finally met Doug Engelbart and attended a demonstration of NLS
at the Fall Joint Computer Conference. This was a landmark presentation in the
history of computing, and the audience, comprised of several thousand engineers and
scientists, witnessed such innovations as the use of hypertext, the computer
mouse
and screen, and and telecollaboration on shared files via video
conferencing for the first time. The unveiling of NLS is now known affectionately and
with great respect as the Mother of All Demos, and was celebrated in December of 2008
at its 40th anniversary with almost all of the original team led by Doug Engelbart on
stage, and Andries Van Dam as the outsider commentator. For Van Dam, this system set
another, and entirely different, technical precedent. The line- or context-editor was
old technology — NLS was the prototype for creating, navigating and storing
information behind a tube and for having a multi-user, multi-terminal cost-effective
system. He went on to design the File Retrieval and Editing System (FRESS) at Brown
with his team of hotshot undergraduates and one masters student. As Van Dam observed
in the Hypertext 1987 conference keynote address, ...my design goal was to steal or improve on the best ideas
from Doug's NLS and put in some things we really liked from the Hypertext
Editing System - a more freeform editing style, no limits to statement size,
for example.
The HES project was frozen as the team started work on the next-generation system.
Meanwhile, IBM sold HES to the Apollo Mission Team at the Houston Manned Spacecraft
Centre (unbeknownst to Nelson and Van Dam and others who had worked on it at the
time). Van Dam now proudly recalls that it was used in NASA's Houston Manned
Spacecraft Center for documentation on the Apollo space program
HES, as a first prototype, naturally had its shortcomings. Part of the goal behind
FRESS was to improve on these shortcomings. Firstly, HES was programmed specifically
for the IBM /360 and the /2250 display; there was no device-independence. Van Dam had
seen the benefits of device-independence in Engelbart’s demonstration; in NLS the command line…worked on basically any device. So they had
really engineered in good device independence from the beginning
Secondly, HES wasn't multi-user; it was specifically targeted towards the 2250, a
machine for individual use didn't have
the kinds of chalk-passing protocols that NLS had
But the most popular new development for novice users in FRESS was not its capacity
to accommodate multiple displays and users; it was the undo
feature. FRESS
pioneered undo for both word processing and hypertext, and arguably influenced the
future design of word processing systems. Every edit to a file was saved in a shadow
version of the data structure, and that allowed for both an autosave
and an
undo. Brown staff and students understood immediately the importance and usefulness
of this feature
Importantly, FRESS supported arbitrary-length strings; it had no size limitations.
According to Van Dam, an important philosophical distinction between NLS and FRESS
was that Doug had these 4,000-character limits on his statements, and
that was an anathema to us. It was an anathema to Ted, when he started out, to
have limits on anything
At the same time, hyperlinks in these files were addressable down to the character.
The granularity was as fine as sand. As Van Dam put it in our interview, I don't want to go to a book, I don't want to go to a chapter, I
want to go to the actual quote!
One of the reasons why the web does not
have the same functionality as earlier hypertext systems such as FRESS or NLS is that
a URL points to a document: unless the author pre-specifies anchors in the target
page, there is no finer granularity than that. In NLS, a link took you to a
statement. In FRESS it could take you to a character. So in this sense, Van Dam
points out, I think we had a
and they certainly had a creamier hypertext than the modern web.creamier
hypertext than NLS
did,
Another aspect of FRESS which the web has not implemented is bidirectional linking.
HES had unidirectional links, and the FRESS team decided that this needed to be
changed. FRESS was the first hypertext system to provide bidirectional linking. It
was also groundbreaking in that it provided different options to
The outline functionality in FRESS was inspired by NLS (or as Van Dam puts it, was a straight rip-off
n levels of the structure — a map whose level of
detail is defined by the user. This facilitates rapid movement between sections and
makes editing and global navigation easier. But most importantly, this meant that in
FRESS [We] had an ability to see the structure space, a
visualisation of all the structure in the text, the outline structure and the
cross-referencing structure. You could do structural rearrangements in that
structure space in a quick overview mode and you would thereby induce those
same edits in the text itself.
In sum, unlike in contemporary hypertext systems like the web, FRESS provided a
variety of coordinated views and conditional structure and view-specification
mechanisms. The user had final control over how and how much of the document was
being displayed — unlike with embedded markup like HTML. It also afforded separation
of structure from formatting and hypertext semantics — also unlike HTML. And all of
these features were designed to be easy to learn for novice users, based as they were
on a multi-window function key and lightpen interface in addition to a command-line
interface (in contrast to NLS, which had a more complex, and correspondingly more
powerful, command language). FRESS actually displayed and handled complex documents
better than non-hypertext word processing
systems of the time. It was so
intuitive and efficient that it was used as a publishing system as well as a collaborative
hypertext environment for teaching, research and development
But this is not to say that FRESS was a run-away success at Brown, or that the
project received financial support. In fact, quite the reverse; computer scientists didn’t think it was computer science, and
humanists weren’t paying for technologies
funny money
), and when you ran out, your time was up. Van Dam
and the FRESS team, of course, were always arguing for more. One year the VP for
Finance told the FRESS team that there would be no more money for this FRESS
hypertext nonsense, as the computer was for serious physics and engineering work. Van
Dam had to use blackmail to keep the project alive. Under the Brown system, the computer is just as much a public
utility as the library, and you can no more cut off people based on their field
from the computer than you can cut them off from the library... only by
threatening to go public and let the campus know that the engineers and
physicists were treating the computer as their private fiefdom [did I] get the
money.
In 1976, the National Endowment for the Humanities supported a FRESS application for
teaching English poetry. The FRESS team, and particularly Van Dam, had wanted to use
the system explicitly for teaching since its inception. In the NEH-sponsored course,
students did all of their critical course reading and writing in the online FRESS
docuverse. A poetry textbook was created in FRESS, to go along with a large
collection of poems by Spenser, Tennyson, Blake and others
Intermedia, a distributed hypermedia system developed at Brown's Institute for Research in Information and Scholarship (IRIS) from 1985-1990, grew directly out of the work done by Van Dam's group. This was intended to be a networked, multiuser teaching tool.
FRESS occurred on the cusp of the network era — 1969. HES had been neither networked
nor multi-user. It was intended to be a personal device, for the use of writers and
editors. But NLS and FRESS were pioneering networked multi-user hypertext systems.
Although FRESS wasn’t ideal in this sense, You could still work together. It was multi-user
I
don't think...that any of us truly envisioned that you could have what we have
today, because the issues of interoperability just seemed far more insurmountable
in those days. We didn't have networks with the kind of bandwidth that you do
today. So, I certainly never foresaw the world-wide web. It surprised me. The fact
that I can reach out and touch stuff in Ethiopia, as it were, is still a surprise
to me.
Van Dam claims he didn't foresee the web; neither he nor Doug Engelbart could have
imagined where their technologies would lead. But it is undeniable HES became the
first working example of hypertext on commercial equipment, and in that sense a
vision of potentiality for all future hypertext technologies. According to Ted
Nelson, HES was actually the precedent to today's web browser
So although there was much resistance to Van Dam's original project, it spawned and
legitimised a new field of research: hypertext. There is still much work to be done
in this arena, work which Van Dam continued to do at Brown, and Engelbart at the
Bootstrap Institute (now called The Doug Engelbart Institute) — the organisation he
founded to continue evolving the relationship between humans and computers. Because the things we decide now will continue to haunt us for
decades. Decades
My thanks to Professor Andries Van Dam, Dr Douglas Engelbart and Dr Ted Nelson for their time and interviews. Thanks also to Professor Van Dam and Rosemary Michelle Simpson for their corrections and comments on this article.