Re: The Perpetual Myth of iSeries Obsolescence

Vernon Hamberg wrote:

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.