Jeff Best <jeffb@jtbest.demon.co.uk> asks an interesting question:
> Date: Sat, 19 Aug 2000 12:32:42 +0100
> Organization: SouthStar Computers Ltd.
>
[I previously wrote]
> >All this allowed Ved's online documentation and program libraries to
> >function as a huge self-referencing hypertext system.
[Jeff]
> Does this predate BT's 11-year old "hypertext" patent, filed in the USA,
> in relation to which, they are claiming the intent to pursue American
> ISPs for license fees?
I don't know anything about the BT patent, but the ideas implemented
in Ved go back a lot more than 11 years. E.g. HELP VEDGETSYSFILE is
dated August 1985. Some of the work was done by Mark Rubinstein, the
first author of that file, who left Sussex University to join GLH
shortly after that. (They were re-implemented in a new form by
John Gibson in the mid 90s, so the original program libraries are
no longer included with poplog.)
We were working on the cross-referencing mechanisms, and included
them in poplog long before I ever heard the word "hypertext".
Poplog, including Ved, first became a commercial product in 1982 (in
that year we sold it to about 20 commercial organisations for about 3000
pounds and a larger number of universities for about 300 pounds). In
1983 Systems Designers Ltd took over commercial marketing.
The idea of search lists for HELP, TEACH, etc. commands were there
before that. At first the "ESC h" command worked only as a surrogate
"help" command. That was probably working by 1981 or 1982. So in that
sense hypertext was invented, and implemented and sold by 1982.
The mechanism was included in the version of Poplog marketed by SDL, and
demonstrated at IJCAI in Germany in 1983 on a Vax running VMS.
I don't know when the generalisation to include multiple
(user-extendable) categories of cross references was added, but as the
1985 help vedgetsysfile document shows clearly, the mechanisms were
already well worked out by then.
So if BT are claiming to have been the first to invent these ideas
around 1989, that is incorrect.
I am not claiming that hypertext was in Poplog first. The ideas are
so natural that I expect they have been reinvented many times.
Incidentally there were BT users of Poplog some time before that,
though I can't remember details.
Aaron
===
Aaron Sloman, ( http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~axs/ )
School of Computer Science, The University of Birmingham, B15 2TT, UK
EMAIL A.Sloman AT cs.bham.ac.uk (ReadATas@please !)
PAPERS: http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/cogaff/
TOOLS: http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/freepoplog.html
The mechanisms
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