Welcome to Advent of Computing, the show that talks about the shocking, intriguing, and all too often relevant history of computing. A lot of little things we take for granted today have rich stories behind their creation, in each episode we will learn how older tech has lead to our modern world.
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episode 61: FRESS and Practical Hypertext
Hypertext has really become a core offering of daily life, and defined the face of the Internet for decades. But the links and formatting we know so well only make up part of the story. Today we are looking at FRESS(the File Retrieval and Editing SyStem), a hypertext system developed at Brown University at the tail end of the 60s. What makes FRESS so crucial in the history of hypertext is that it was extensively studied. Multiple experiments were carried out to test if FRESS, and hypertext in general, had a place in classrooms. Some useful sources from this episode: https://sci-hub.do/10.1162%2F109966299751940814 1999 paper on FRESS and hypertext in general by Andres van Dam https://archive.org/details/VanDamFinalReport1976 Final experimental report https://archive.org/details/AndyVanDamHypertextFilm Short film on the FRESS experiment