RE: The Perpetual Myth of iSeries Obsolescence

[Vernon Hamberg <vhamberg@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

I don't think MS invented hyperlinking - consider this from the 
wikipedia main article on hyperlink

========================================

The term "hyperlink" was coined in 1965 (or possibly 1964) by 
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Nelson>Ted Nelson at the start of 
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu>Project Xanadu. Nelson 
had been inspired by 
"<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/As_We_May_Think>As We May Think," a 
popular essay by <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vannevar_Bush>Vannevar 
Bush. In the essay, Bush described a microfilm-based machine in which 
one could link any two pages of information into a "trail" of related 
information, and then scroll back and forth among pages in a trail as 
if they were on a single microfilm reel. The closest contemporary 
analogy would be to build a list of bookmarks to topically related 
Web pages and then allow the user to scroll forward and backward 
through the list.

In a series of books and articles published from 1964 through 1980, 
Nelson transposed Bush's concept of automated cross-referencing into 
the computer context, made it applicable to specific text strings 
rather than whole pages, generalized it from a local desk-sized 
machine to a theoretical worldwide computer network, and advocated 
the creation of such a network. Meanwhile, working independently, a 
team led by <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Engelbart>Douglas 
Engelbart (with <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Rulifson>Jeff 
Rulifson as chief programmer) was the first to implement the 
hyperlink concept for scrolling within a single document (1966), and 
soon after for connecting between paragraphs within separate 
documents (1968). See 
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NLS_%28computer_system%29>NLS.

========================================

Also, how long have there been links in the online help on the 
iSeries? These are hyperlinks and usually are underlined. UIM has had 
this at least since 1997 - the keyword LINK (Hypertext link 
definition) is to be found in the "Application Display Programming" 
manual that is still the current one and came from 1997.

John Sears once suggested there is nothing new under the sun, that 
most of the large-computing problems have been solved. however, we 
keep reinventing the wheel, esp. when we sit in our bedrooms with our 
little PCs and think we have made the latest hot thing to take over the world.

Oy - where did that come from!
Later
Vern

At 10:51 PM 5/6/2006, you wrote:

>    Nit picking
>
>    Microsoft gets hit by people, for ripping off Mac, only when those people
>    have forgotten that the Mac was a rip off of Xerox Sparc, which was put
>    into the public domain to benefit education, because Xerox did not see a
>    market for GUI.
>
>    If push button controls were an MSFT invention, then they independently
>    duplicated the prior art.  It is not unusual in the computer world for
>    something to be developed for some system, then again for another, then
>    again, then again, then again, to infinity, without referring to the prior
>    art.
>
>    I suspect, but am not sure, that Microsoft invented hyper linking.  That's
>    where you have an Internet url underlined in blue, or documentation with a
>    word underlined in blue.
>
>    -
>    Al Macintyre
>    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:AlMac
>    http://www.ryze.com/go/Al9Mac
>    BPCS/400 Computer Janitor ... see
>    http://radio.weblogs.com/0107846/stories/2002/11/08/bpcsDocSources.html
> --
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