The File Retrieval and Editing SyStem, or FRESS, was a hypertext system developed at Brown University starting in 1968 by Andries van Dam and his students, including Bob Wallace. It was the first hypertext system to run on readily available commercial hardware and OS. It is also possibly the first computer-based system to have had an "undo" feature for quickly correcting small editing or navigational mistakes. [1]
FRESS was a continuation of work done on van Dam's previous hypertext system, HES, developed the previous year. FRESS ran on an IBM 360-series mainframe running VM/CMS. It improved on HES's capabilities in many ways, inspired by Douglas Engelbart's NLS. FRESS implemented one of the first virtual terminal interfaces, in order to provide device-independence. It could run on various terminals from dumb typewriters up to the Imlac PDS-1 graphical minicomputer. On the PDS-1, it supported multi-window WYSIWYG editing and graphics display. The PDS-1 used a light pen, not a mouse, and the light pen could be "clicked" using a foot-pedal.
FRESS allowed multiple users to collaborate on as set of documents, which could be of arbitrary size, and (unlike prior systems) were not laid out in lines until the moment of display. FRESS users could insert a marker at any location within a text document and link the marked selection to any other point either in the same document or a different document. This was much like the World Wide Web of today, but without the need for the anchor hyperlinks that HTML requires. Links were also bi-directional, unlike in today's web. [1]
FRESS had two types of links: tags and "jumps". Tags were links to information such as references or footnotes, while "jumps" were links that could take the user through many separate but related documents. FRESS also had the ability to assign keywords to links or text blocks to assist with navigation. Keywords could be used to select which sections to display or print, which links would be available to the user, and so on. Multiple "spaces" were also automatically maintained, including an automatic table of contents and indexes to keywords, document structures, and so on. Users could view a visualization of the "structure space" of the texts and cross-reference links, and could directly rearrange the structure space, and automatically update the links to match. [2]
FRESS was essentially a text-based system and editing links was a fairly complex task unless you had access to the PDS-1 terminal, in which case you could select each end with the lightpen and create a link with a couple of keystrokes. FRESS provided no method for knowing where the user was within a collection of documents.
FRESS was used as educational technology for several classes at Brown, probably being the first hypertext system used in education. Most notably it was used for teaching an introduction to poetry in 1975 and 1976. In those days it was difficult to convince faculty in the humanities that computers could be useful in their teaching or work, or to convince the people funding the computer center that writing was an appropriate use of the expensive computers of the time. But English Professor Robert Scholes and two teaching assistants worked with the FRESS team to run a small experiment funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. They saw hypertext as an attractive new way to present poetry, which is often highly reflexive and full of allusions and references to other works. They also wanted to help students directly interact with the course material, and engage with other students and instructors to collectively add meaning to it. There was only a single Imlac terminal, which students signed up for time on, so only 12 students per course could use FRESS. The students in the section which read and commented on the material via FRESS wrote about three times as much as students in control groups, and seemed to benefit from the use of the system, but given the small number of students in the study, the uncertainty in the results is high. [3] [4] A short film was made to document the project, [5] which was rediscovered and shown as part of NEH's 50th anniversary celebration. [6] [7]
FRESS was for many years the word processor of choice at Brown and a small number of other sites. It was used for typesetting many books, including those by Roderick Chisholm, Robert Coover and Rosmarie Waldrop. [8] For example, in the Preface to Person and Object Chisholm writes "The book would not have been completed without the epoch-making File Retrieval and Editing System..." [9]
Through the diligent work of Alan Hecht, FRESS survived a major OS upgrade around 1978. Around the same time Jonathan Prusky wrote thorough user documentation for the system as well, in The FRESS Resource Manual. Although support had to be withdrawn a few years later for lack of resources and while rarely used, FRESS still runs on the current Brown mainframe.
For the ACM Hypertext '89 conference, David Durand reverse-engineered the PDS-1 terminal and created an emulator for the Apple Macintosh. [10] He and Steven DeRose, the last FRESS project director, recovered the old poetry class databases and gave live demos on this and a few later occasions. [11]
Hypertext is text displayed on a computer display or other electronic devices with references (hyperlinks) to other text that the reader can immediately access. Hypertext documents are interconnected by hyperlinks, which are typically activated by a mouse click, keypress set, or screen touch. Apart from text, the term "hypertext" is also sometimes used to describe tables, images, and other presentational content formats with integrated hyperlinks. Hypertext is one of the key underlying concepts of the World Wide Web, where Web pages are often written in the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). As implemented on the Web, hypertext enables the easy-to-use publication of information over the Internet.
Memex is a hypothetical electromechanical device for interacting with microform documents and described in Vannevar Bush's 1945 article "As We May Think". Bush envisioned the memex as a device in which individuals would compress and store all of their books, records, and communications, "mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility". The individual was supposed to use the memex as an automatic personal filing system, making the memex "an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory". The name memex is a portmanteau of memory and expansion.
Theodor Holm Nelson is an American pioneer of information technology, philosopher, and sociologist. He coined the terms hypertext and hypermedia in 1963 and published them in 1965. According to a 1997 Forbes profile, Nelson "sees himself as a literary romantic, like a Cyrano de Bergerac, or 'the Orson Welles of software'."
Project Xanadu was the first hypertext project, founded in 1960 by Ted Nelson. Administrators of Project Xanadu have declared it superior to the World Wide Web, with the mission statement: "Today's popular software simulates paper. The World Wide Web trivialises our original hypertext model with one-way ever-breaking links and no management of version or contents."
e-text is a general term for any document that is read in digital form, and especially a document that is mainly text. For example, a computer-based book of art with minimal text, or a set of photographs or scans of pages, would not usually be called an "e-text". An e-text may be a binary or a plain text file, viewed with any open source or proprietary software. An e-text may have markup or other formatting information, or not. An e-text may be an electronic edition of a work originally composed or published in other media, or may be created in electronic form originally. The term is usually synonymous with e-book.
This article presents a timeline of hypertext technology, including "hypermedia" and related human–computer interaction projects and developments from 1945 on. The term hypertext is credited to the author and philosopher Ted Nelson.
The Hypertext Editing System, or HES, was an early hypertext research project conducted at Brown University in 1967 by Andries van Dam, Ted Nelson, and several Brown students. It was the first hypertext system available on commercial equipment that novices could use.
Guide was a hypertext system developed by Peter J. Brown at the University of Kent in 1982. The original Guide implementation was for Three Rivers PERQ workstations running Unix. The Guide system became the third hypertext system to be sold commercially, marketed by Office Workstations Ltd (OWL) in 1984 and later by InfoAccess. It won Brown the British Computer Society's award for technical innovation in 1988. He retired in 1999 and died of cancer in 2007, according to a tribute page at the University of Kent website.
An image retrieval system is a computer system used for browsing, searching and retrieving images from a large database of digital images. Most traditional and common methods of image retrieval utilize some method of adding metadata such as captioning, keywords, title or descriptions to the images so that retrieval can be performed over the annotation words. Manual image annotation is time-consuming, laborious and expensive; to address this, there has been a large amount of research done on automatic image annotation. Additionally, the increase in social web applications and the semantic web have inspired the development of several web-based image annotation tools.
"The Mother of All Demos" was a landmark computer demonstration of developments by the Augmentation Research Center, given at the Association for Computing Machinery / Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (ACM/IEEE)—Computer Society's Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco, by Douglas Engelbart, on December 9, 1968. The name The Mother of All Demos has been retroactively applied to the demonstration.
NLS, or the "oN-Line System", was a revolutionary computer collaboration system developed in the 1960s. It was designed by Douglas Engelbart and implemented by researchers at the Augmentation Research Center (ARC) at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI). It was the first computer system to employ the practical use of hypertext links, a computer mouse, raster-scan video monitors, information organized by relevance, screen windowing, presentation programs, and other modern computing concepts. It was funded by ARPA, NASA, and the US Air Force.
Undo is an interaction technique which is implemented in many computer programs. It erases the last change done to the document, reverting it to an older state. In some more advanced programs, such as graphic processing, undo will negate the last command done to the file being edited. With the possibility of undo, users can explore and work without fear of making mistakes, because they can easily be undone.
Andries "Andy" van Dam is a Dutch-American professor of computer science and former vice-president for research at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. Together with Ted Nelson he contributed to the first hypertext system, Hypertext Editing System (HES) in the late 1960s. He co-authored Computer Graphics: Principles and Practice along with J.D. Foley, S.K. Feiner, and John Hughes. He also co-founded the precursor of the ACM SIGGRAPH conference.
Intermedia was the third notable hypertext project to emerge from Brown University, after HES (1967) and FRESS (1969). Intermedia was started in 1985 by Norman Meyrowitz, who had been associated with sooner hypertext research at Brown. The Intermedia project coincided with the establishment of the Institute for Research in Information and Scholarship (IRIS). Some of the materials that came from Intermedia, authored by Meyrowitz, Nancy Garrett, and Karen Catlin were used in the development of HTML.
IMLAC Corporation was an American electronics company in Needham, Massachusetts, that manufactured graphical display systems, mainly the PDS-1 and PDS-4, in the 1970s.
Community Memory (CM) was the first public computerized bulletin board system. Established in 1973 in Berkeley, California, it used an SDS 940 timesharing system in San Francisco connected via a 110 baud link to a teleprinter at a record store in Berkeley to let users enter and retrieve messages. Individuals could place messages in the computer and then look through the memory for a specific notice.
Search engine indexing is the collecting, parsing, and storing of data to facilitate fast and accurate information retrieval. Index design incorporates interdisciplinary concepts from linguistics, cognitive psychology, mathematics, informatics, and computer science. An alternate name for the process, in the context of search engines designed to find web pages on the Internet, is web indexing.
The Electronic Document System (EDS) was an early hypertext system – also known as the Interactive Graphical Documents (IGD) hypermedia system – focused on creation of interactive documents such as equipment repair manuals or computer-aided instruction texts with embedded links and graphics. EDS was a 1978–1981 research project at Brown University by Steven Feiner, Sandor Nagy and Andries van Dam.
DynaText is an SGML publishing tool. It was introduced in 1990, and was the first system to handle arbitrarily large SGML documents, and to render them according to multiple style-sheets that could be switched at will.
Hypertext is text displayed on a computer or other electronic device with references (hyperlinks) to other text that the reader can immediately access, usually by a mouse click or keypress sequence. Early conceptions of hypertext defined it as text that could be connected by a linking system to a range of other documents that were stored outside that text. In 1934 Belgian bibliographer, Paul Otlet, developed a blueprint for links that telescoped out from hypertext electrically to allow readers to access documents, books, photographs, and so on, stored anywhere in the world.
