Making links

[nmg]

Some years ago, back when I was in sixth form and trying to decide what I wanted to study at University, the BBC broadcast a Horizon documentary on novel interfaces for computers, which was presented by Douglas Adams and Tom Baker. The documentary presented a future information system in which you could follow links between documents, images and videos, with software "agents" that helped you find things. More than anything else, it was a novel documentary by itself; how better to show what a new information system might be like, than to film the documentary as if it were being presented by that information system.

The memory of this documentary, Hyperland, stayed with me, and was one of the reasons why I decided to read computer science rather than electronics (this book and this book were the other reasons). Moving forward a few years, I first came across the Web in the autumn of 1993, with the release of the Mosaic browser (I can still remember various of my contemporaries, possibly including evildespot and perdita_fysh, telling me that the Web wouldn't come to anything).

The early Web was quite exhilarating, but it still didn't live up to the promise of Hyperland. I graduated and moved to Cambridge. As I got more disillusioned with my employer (a certain large Scandinavian mobile telecoms company that isn't Ericsson), I spent more time reading academic papers on the subject of hypertext and agents. In order to get a better grounding in AI, I studied for my Masters in Edinburgh. After that, I looked around for PhD places, and found that the University of Southampton was the place to go in the UK if you wanted to do research on hypertext.

The rest, as they say, is history.

Comments

[perdita-fysh.livejournal.com]

I remember that bit. You were web-boy, full of the glories of the new technology of HTTP. I thought it was a truly horrendous waste of bandwidth that couldn't ever possibly suceed because those links which happily sustained rooms full of us on command line would collapse in minutes if more than a couple decided to start ferrying that amount of data around all the time. How could it ever possibly survive?

[nmg.livejournal.com]

Can I now declare victory, or will you insist on waiting for a few more years to see if the Web collapses under the weight of video blogs and home-made pornography?

[perdita-fysh.livejournal.com]

You can declare victory as long as you do so from a WAP enabled phone in a GPRS only area via the graphical user interface here on LJ.

[nmg.livejournal.com]

Sad to say, I could do so from a telnet session, but not from my phone.

[gothick-matt.livejournal.com]

Damn. It won't let me log in. I can post new entries by email from the phone, but I've never tried the actual mobile LJ interface. I've still only found a few things (notably fastmail's mail interface) which actually work on a simple phone, i.e. my little not-running-Windows-Mobile Motorola.

But you understand, I did have to try :)

[gothick-matt.livejournal.com]

collapses under the weight of video blogs and home-made pornography

Heh. I was wondering the other day whether anyone's given serious thought to a stream encoder which favours predominantly pink scenes, mostly static but with repetitive sections, and is particularly good at compressing audio with 70's wah-wah'd guitars...

[(Anonymous)]

I recall him talking about HTML and saying something like "Ordinary people will be able to use the internet!"

I said that ordinary people would never want to...

I've never been particularly prescient, but that comment was a low point even for me.

~Katie

[nmg.livejournal.com]

To be fair, I didn't envisage that the killer app of the web would be e-commerce, and thought that a combination of collaborative open library and social space would be more likely. Does this make me Web2.0 before my time?