COM125 Week2: Hypertext Usability

In the beginning, all the clever minds responsible for the computer age we experience today were engineers and computer scientists working behind government walls or within private industries.

All dreamt about the electronic brain which could combined human and machine thinking into one, resulting to a superior hybrid of sorts. That electronic brain is known as a computer. Earlier computers had access to networks which later make up the World Wide Web (WWW) and now, our lives are intertwined with the WWW.

The question is how did complex machines only engineers and scientists with college degrees could understand and operate in the beginning become something everyone could learn how to use with ease today? What allowed the usability?

The answer is hypertext. Without it, there probably would not be a lot of people online because its purpose is to link information on a page to other pages across a given network. This provided convenient information sharing and encouraged the usability mentioned above.

In his book, Howard Rheingold (1993) mentions humans tend to perceive the world visually. He maintains we humans extract information better with color and patterns then a page of numbers. As if acting in accordance to Rheingold's opinion, Ivan Sutherland and Alan Key, along with a group of young individuals from the Lincoln Lab and the University of Utah worked on interactive computer graphics.

What began as an alphabetic printout later evolved to graphic screen display. This paved the way for the design of the 'human-computer interface' and at the same time, being mindful to its users who are regular people.

With the advent of pattern manipulation across display screens, not only could text be displayed, graphics were allowed too. This breakthrough in turn spurred interchangeable usage between computer and graphics –you could use graphics to control the computer and vice versa. This then led to the user friendliness of the computers to non-programmers.

While in the earlier days, a person had to type in a phrase to command the computer, the modern user need only point to an image and click on a button to call up the command. This 'point-and-click' command is crucial where hypertext is concern.



The whole premise of hypertext was so that people could explore information in a new way through the use of computers. A computer scientist in the 1960s named Ted Nelson (Gralla, 2007, p. 161) thought up the concept of hypertext. He was concerned about how people would share information between computers.

The concept was later developed into something feasible. In 1989, CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics, introduced its network to the public via the external Internet. CERN researcher (Kazmierczak, 1997), Tim Berners-Lee, was working on an idea he was waiting to put to the test. When the company opened its door to the public, it provided the opportunity Berners-Lee needed to implement his idea.

Throughout the 1980s he had been developing on Nelson's hypertext concept, created as part of the 'Xanadu project'. The concept encompasses a simple idea –authors of documents were allowed to add links and names to indicate to other items relevant to their documents.

A proposal for this idea was presented to CERN with the title 'Information Management: A Proposal: Introduction of linked information systems, non-linear text systems' in March 1989. Later, this laid out the foundations of the Internet.

Berners-Lee's proposed idea did not come without its setbacks. He needed to further revise his proposal in May 1990 because developments on his idea did not go according to plan. The first program he had developed on his NeXT machine in November 1990 was an effort to put things in the right direction. The program consisted of a WYSIWYG browser and editor that demonstrated his ideas of displaying information in a non-linear fashion through the use of hypertext.

Laying out the groundwork for the WWW was not an easy task. Brilliant minds needed to worked and developed on their ideas time and time again to get the desired results. Had the idea of hypertext not been thought of, the WWW would have been a portal only a chosen few with degrees could access.

We have the dedicated individuals who were visionaries and computer enthusiasts to thank for bringing the Internet to the masses and connecting people in the process.

References

Gralla, P. (2007). How The Internet Works. Indiana: Que Publishing

Kazmierczak, M. (1997). Enter CERN. Internet History. Retrieved January 26, 2006, from http://www.mkaz.com/ebeab/history/

Rheingold, H. (1993). Chapter Three: Visionaries and Convergences: The Accidental History of the Net. The Virtual Community. Retrieved January 26, 2007, from http://www.rheingold.com/vc/book/3.html