Multimedia History

    Hypertext defined.
  • 1945. Vannevar Bush (more) and the Memex. Advisor to president Roosevelt

  • 1968. Douglas 'Doug' Engelbart, 'mouse', multiple windows, distributed collaboration (teleconferencing), wordprocessing with commands and use of 'mouse' . In his Augment Project tried to introduced tools that should not disturb 'high-level' thinking (compare to near real access to models in Virtual Reality emvironments).

  • 1964 Ted Nelson talks about 'hypertext'. The Xanadu project aiming at linking all text produced with backward references, versioning and linked access, multiple forms of content (not only text), classification of text (author,..). Autodesk made a prototype around 1990.

  • 1967. Nicholas Negroponte forms the Architecture Machine Group in the Architecture Department at MIT and later gets his own building, Media Lab, at MIT. Example at Architecture (around 1977) was the interactive wall where you could point and move things (video screen back wall projection).

  • Xerox PARC in Palo Alto presents a personal computer, Alto, later with XeroxStar operating system with windows, mouse and icons. Apple Lisa takes up the ideas 1983. (Steven Jobs regrets he did not stay 20 minutes more at Xerox to hear about TCP/IP. Instaed Apple developped AppleTalk).

  • 1978 the Aspen Movie Map interactive laser disk (a type of interactive movie) (MIT Media Lab)

  • 1983 MIT educational computer network, the Athena project.

  • 1987, Apple releases HyperCard.

  • 1993, World Wide Web





©Per Christiansson, 16.2.2000