This book explores the history of hypertext, an influential concept that forms the underlying structure of the World Wide Web and innumerable software applications. Barnet combines an analysis of contemporary literature with her exclusive interviews with those at the forefront of the hypertext innovation. She tells both the human and the technological story, tracing its path back to an analogue device imagined by Vannevar Bush in 1945, before modern computing had happened. ‘Memory Machines’ offers an expansive record of hypertext over the last 60 years, pinpointing the major breakthroughs and fundamental flaws in its evolution. Barnet argues that some of the earliest hypertext systems were more richly connected and in some respects more flexible than the Web; this is also a fascinating account of the paths not taken. Barnet ends the journey through computing history at the birth of mass domesticated hypertext, at the point that it grew out of the university labs and into the Web. And yet she suggests that hypertext may not have completed its evolutionary story, and may still have the capacity to become something different, something much better than it is today.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1978.

Making Hypermedia Work: A User's Guide to HyTime discusses how the HyTime standard can be applied to real world problems of navigating from here to there in collections of documents. The HyTime standard itself provides enabling method and templates for various information structures such as links and various kinds of location indicators. A HyTime application specifies how a group applies those templates to their particular requirements. This involves choosing which HyTime structures are needed, setting up conventions for how they are to be used and setting up management and processes for creation, conversion and update of hypermedia documents. A HyTime engine is the last ingredient: actually using an application typically involves choosing software to support one's use of HyTime and customizing it as needed. This may be as simple as setting up hypertextual style sheets that determine how links and other things look and act. More specialized applications may require full-scale design and programming. Making Hypermedia Work: A User's Guide to HyTime presents the first in-depth guide to the HyTime specifications, both describing its key features and providing guidelines on how it is used. The book begins with the more familiar structures of books, graphics and cross-references, detailing the HyTime constructs and models used to identify, locate, and link data. It goes on to introduce some of HyTime's mechanisms for linking multidimensional, multimedia data, and for scheduling it in space and time. The authors help the reader become fluent in HyTime as it applies to the simpler and most widely understood data types. After mastering this level of HyTime, readers will be ready and able to explore the exciting potential of HyTime for more sophisticated multimedia applications.