Old Vintage Computing Research

It's time for another entry in the Prior Art Department and today we'll consider a forgotten yet still extant sidebar of the early 1990s Internet. If you had Internet access at home back then, it was almost certainly dialup modem (like I did); only the filthy rich had T1 lines or ISDN. Moreover, from a user perspective, the hosts you connected to were their own universe. You got your shell account or certain interactive services over Telnet (and, for many people including yours truly, E-mail), you got your news postings from the spool either locally or NNTP, and you got your files over FTP. It may have originated elsewhere, but everything on the host you connected to was a local copy: the mail you received, the files you could access, the posts you could read. Exceptional circumstances like NFS notwithstanding, what you could see and access was local -- it didn't point somewhere else.

Around this time, however, was when sites started referencing other sites, much like the expulsion from Eden. In 1990 both HYTELNET and Archie appeared, which were early search engines for Telnet and FTP resources. Since they relied on accurate information about sites they didn't control, both of them had to regularly update their databases. Gopher, when it emerged in 1991, consciously tried to be a friendlier FTP by presenting files and resources hung from a hierarchy of menus, which could even point to menus on other hosts. That meant you didn't have to locally mirror a service to point people at it, but if the referenced menu was relocated or removed, the link to it was broken and the reference's one-way nature meant there was no automated way to trace back and fix it. And then there was that new World Wide Web thing introduced to the public in 1993: a powerful soup of media and hypertext with links that could point to nearly anything, but they were unidirectional as well, and the sheer number even in modest documents could quickly overwhelm users in a rapidly expanding environment. Not for nothing was the term "linkrot" first attested around 1996, as well as how disoriented a user might get following even perfectly valid links down a seemingly infinite rabbithole.

Of course, other technically-minded folks had long been aware of the problem, and as early as 1989 an academic team in Austria was already trying to attack the problem of "access to all kinds of information one can think of." In this world, documents and media resources could be associated together into a defined hierarchy, the relationships between them were discoverable and bidirectional, and systems were searchable by design. Links could be in anything, not just text. Clients could log into servers or be anonymous, logged-in users could post content, and in the background servers could talk to other servers to let them know what changes had occurred so they could synchronize references. Along the way, as new information resources via WAIS, Gopher and the Web started to appear, their content could also be brought into these servers to form a unified whole. This system was Hyper-G, and we'll demonstrate it -- on period-correct classic RISC hardware, as we do -- and provide the software so you can too.

Read more >>

(Hat tip to the late Bill Strauss and The Capitol Steps' Lirty Dies.) A few moons ago I was thinking of ways to take my Palm OS Fossil Wrist PDA smartwatch mobile. It has no on-board networking libraries but can be coerced into doing PPP over its serial port (via USB) by using the libraries from my Palm m505. Of course, that then requires it be constantly connected to a USB port, which is rather inconvenient for a wristwatch.

But what if the USB connection could be made wirelessly? For a few years, real honest-to-goodness wireless USB devices were actually a thing. Competing standards led to market fracture and the technologies fizzled out relatively quickly in the marketplace, but like the parallel universe of FireWire hubs there was another parallel world of wireless USB devices, at least for a few years. As it happens, we now have a couple of them here, so it's worth exploring what wireless USB was and what happened to it, how the competing standards worked (and how well), and if it would have helped.

Read more >>

In the halcyon days of analogue modems and POTS dialup Internet, when the only wireless connection in your house was between the cordless phone and the wall, anything having to do with the Web was best consumed in small bites (pun intended). If you wanted to take data with you, you downloaded it first.

Which brings us to this.

Smartwatches at the turn of the century were a more motley assortment than today's, with an even wilder range of functionality. If you had a few hundred dollars or so, there were some interesting options, even back then. But if all you had was $85 (in 2024 dollars about $150), you still weren't left out, because in 2001 you could get the Web-@nywhere (the "Worldwide Web Watch"). Load up the software on your PC and slap it in its little docking station, and you could slurp down about 93K of precious Web data to scroll on the 59x16 screen -- 10 characters by 2 characters -- to read any time you wanted!

That is, of course, if the remote host the watch's Windows 9x-based client accessed were still up, on which it depended for virtually anything to download and install. Well, I want 95,488 bytes of old smartwatch tiny screen Web on my wrist, darn it. We're going to reverse-engineer this sucker and write our own system using real live modern Web data. So there!

Read more >>

I've been building up a few of these entries in my head as I run across things, so this will be the first of a recurring series of "prior art": technologies and ideas we use today that had earlier, different paths and implementations. For this inagural entry we'll be looking at OWL Guide, an early hypertext system for the Macintosh, and contrasting it with HTML and the modern Web.

Of course, hypertext didn't start with the microcomputer; one of the earliest document-oriented forms (as opposed to card- or frame-oriented like HyperCard or KMS, as well as other concepts) was the 1967 Hypertext Editing System, running on a partition on an IBM System/360 Model 50, contemporary with the baroque but much celebrated oN-Line System which formed the basis for the 1968 Mother of All Demos. However, the microcomputer was where it started to gain steam, with early text-only implementations like the DOS-based 1983 PhotoQuery, which became TIES in 1984. TIES' key innovation was advancing the convention that the text itself contained the links embedded within it, rather than navigating using external numbered menus, codes, icons or other gadgets. (TIES later evolved into HyperTIES, which in 1988 introduced early implementations of imagemaps and style sheets using its own "HTML" [HyperTIES Markup Language] for screen design, also based on SGML. HyperTIES was credited as the first instance where hyperlinks are blue.)

This was a natural fit for GUIs, and hypertext/hypermedia flourished on the early Macintosh. Naturally everyone remembers HyperCard and its various clones, the archetype (but not the prototype) of card-based hypermedia, but one of the earliest hypertext systems on any desktop computer was OWL Guide for the Mac, dating to 1986.

Read more >>