Broad Band

by Claire L. Evans

  When she graduated from CalTech with an English degree, she started working as a systems analyst for a company that did radars and signal processing in Santa Monica. Her office had a view of the ocean, but she wrote utility code for a Prime microcomputer, about as dry a technical job as you could get in those days. She went to work at Xerox PARC in the mid-1980s. Even outside computing circles, PARC was known for its freewheeling, hothouse approach: engineers worked alongside anthropologists on a terraced campus built into a wooded hillside overlooking Silicon Valley, and important meetings were held in a room full of corduroy beanbag chairs, low and cozy enough that nobody would be tempted to jump up and attack anyone else’s ideas.

  After so many years of feeling like an outsider, Cathy worked hard to become part of Xerox PARC’s unorthodox workplace culture. “The thing I loved most about PARC is that it was really multidisciplinary,” she remembers. “I think it would be hard to find a place that was like that now. They weren’t afraid to hire people that had different kinds of backgrounds.” The mix was fun: she’d sometimes get silly with the computer scientists, putting Ivory soap in the office microwave until it made huge piles of snaking froth, and she participated in PARC’s Artist-in-Residence Program, which paired artists with technologists to create ambitious new media works. Her partner, Judy Malloy, a poet, would often cut a sideways path across the PARC campus, through a field with horses and under a barbed-wire fence, just to pass by Cathy’s office window and wave hello.

  NoteCards, the first system Cathy worked on at Xerox PARC, was modeled after the kinds of old-school writing techniques about which we’d soon find ourselves debating the relative merits. The software emulated “the way you wrote papers when you were in junior high: with notecards and file boxes.” Using hypertext links, users could chain their cards into complex collections, sequences, and mental maps, modeling their thought processes and making it easier for others to understand their conclusions. NoteCards wasn’t a writing tool, and it wasn’t an information browser like Microcosm, either. When pressed, Cathy calls it an “idea processor.”

  Hypertext is to text as the technical grammar of cinema is to celluloid: words on-screen become a dynamic medium through buttons and links, just as jump cuts and editing tricks turn moving images into movies. This grammar can be applied to any kind of text, making hypertext highly useful for everything from browsing the Web, as we do today, to idea processing and writing choose-your-own-adventure fiction. NoteCards was designed for intelligence analysis. Before recommending policy, Cathy figured, intelligence brass might want to examine the underlying argument. “Back then I was naïve,” she says, and laughs.

  The intelligence community never picked up on hypertext, but NoteCards fit perfectly into the multidisciplinary atmosphere of Xerox PARC, a place where anthropologists, linguists, physicists, and computer scientists worked alongside one another. Installed on all the campus workstations, NoteCards became a vital tool for sharing ideas across disciplines, and its influence flowed beyond PARC’s borders. In 1987, Apple released a NoteCards–like application, HyperCard, which came bundled with Apple Macintosh and Apple IIGS computers and became the most popular hypermedia system ever developed before the advent of the World Wide Web. People used it to build databases, write branching novels, and create PowerPoint–like presentation slides. Popular games, like the bestselling CD-ROM Myst, were prototyped in HyperCard. Within Apple, it was often used to test out interface design ideas, and some publishers even issued magazines as HyperCard “stacks.”

  Nineteen eighty-seven was a banner year for hypertext, as it happens. Beyond the release of HyperCard, it marked the first academic hypertext conference, Hypertext ’87, in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Academic conferences of this type can forge intellectual communities out of atomized researchers, and this is what happened in North Carolina. Twice as many delegates as expected showed up, leading one attendee to observe a “rueful sense that this was the last time any hypertext gathering will be of manageable size.” It was a heady mix, unusual for a technical conference, due largely to hypertext’s many possibilities in the humanities: computer scientists rubbed elbows with classicists, professors with entrepreneurs. “The hypertext conferences were lovely, wonderful in those days,” Wendy Hall tells me. “We had what I call the literati there, the poets and the writers. I think that’s why it attracted more women.”

  “Computer science has always marginalized people that are interested in users,” explains Cathy, but they found common ground in hypertext research, which was really the study of how people use computers to organize thoughts and data. Those who attended Hypertext ’87 came home emboldened by the realization that hypertext wasn’t an esoteric interest pursued only by a few fanatics but rather a true movement—one to which tech giants like Apple had clearly been paying attention. “There were little islands of ideas, when we started,” Cathy remembers, but as the community coalesced, scholars like Cathy and Wendy began to think of their vastly different systems as part of a whole. The hypertext systems to come would influence one another in manifold ways, progressively refining the ideas that undergird our century’s most transformative information technology.

  Part of being interested in users is paying attention to how they use software once it’s in their hands. Surveying a group of Xerox PARC scholars working in NoteCards, Cathy’s colleagues found that although each person “inhabited” the system differently, most used it to plot the big picture: organizing and structuring, sketching outlines, and maintaining references. Building connections and viewing them globally helped writers work through their arguments and ideas, and since NoteCards allowed multiple arrangements to exist in parallel, writers could explore various interpretations before settling. Cathy called this kind of work “knowledge-structuring,” and it would dominate her subsequent research. The children of NoteCards—Aquanet, a system named after a hairspray because it held knowledge in place, and VIKI, the first spatial hypertext system—allowed users to organize ideas spatially from the outset, creating graphical schemas for how things fit together. Studying philosophy and logic, and consulting with the anthropologists and social scientists at Xerox PARC, Cathy learned how interpreting material and developing a position is often a process of abstract associations “difficult to articulate within the bounds of language, no matter how informal.” Her hypertext systems were meant to empower kinesthetic thinking, the process of moving things around and trying them out akin to “wiggling molecular models in space or moving a jigsaw puzzle piece into different orientations.”

  All of this might sound bogglingly abstract and strange. Why spend so much time arranging boxes on a screen? But even in the physical world, the piles and clusters we make reflect our thinking: I’m reminded of Jake Feinler’s desk at the NIC, covered in precious piles of paper, and of my own desk at home, with its mountains of dog-eared books, notepads, printouts. Their proximity to one another, and their distance from arms’ reach, suggest thematic connections and conceptual closeness to my thought process. In an influential paper of the hypertext era, Alison Kidd, a researcher at Hewlett-Packard, called such piles “spatial holding patterns,” suggesting that they play an important role in “creating, exploring and changing structures which can inform us in novel ways.”

  Cathy’s hypertext systems shifted all these mental patterns on-screen and integrated them into larger writing and argument-building environments, presaging the ways in which we’d all soon find ourselves working on computers, with ever-expanding tabs, documents, and apps organized to suit our particular thought processes. They also demonstrate just how complex and nuanced hypertext can be, when the technology is explored to its fullest potential: it supports not just links but entire mental maps, systems that model—and more important, change—our minds.

  This is the kind of thinking that prompts Cathy, thirty-odd years later, to tell me that what’s on paper is incidental. That the only important thing is what stays in your head. If m
y documents, strewn on my desk or clustered as icons on a screen, appear inscrutable to an outside observer, that’s no flaw in my system. They should be meaningless, because they’re only the remnants of a transformation process, like a sheaf of molted skin. The real technology is the user.

  That means me. And you.

  HYPERTEXT ’91

  It all came to a head at Hypertext ’91.

  The conference was held that year in San Antonio, Texas. North Carolina had indeed been the first and last time the hypertext community would be a manageable size—in the four years since Hypertext ’87, it had exploded, and academics, writers, engineers, and developers from around the world converged in Texas for the occasion. Wendy Hall came from England to demonstrate the latest build of Microcosm. The conference floor, a hotel reception area lined with rows of tables, was clustered with representatives from dozens of hypertext projects with names like AnswerBook and LinkWorks. Several tables down from Wendy Hall sat another British computer scientist, Tim Berners-Lee. He’d had his conference paper rejected, but he’d come to San Antonio anyway, to show off a new system to the hypertext crowd.

  He’d brought Robert Caillau, a colleague from CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research. The pair was demonstrating a distributed hypertext system Berners-Lee had built to make sharing data on networked computers across their massive Swiss campus a little easier. To anyone who saw it in 1991, it would have looked something like NoteCards or Apple’s HyperCard: small graphical “pages” connected by links. The major difference was that these pages didn’t all live on the same computer; Berners-Lee and Caillau, in the hopes of making data accessible to physicists outside of CERN, had built their hypertext system on the backbone of the academic Internet. They called it the World Wide Web.

  To demonstrate the World Wide Web, Berners-Lee and Caillau brought their own computer with them on the plane from Geneva: a ten-thousand-dollar jet-black NeXT cube, at the time the only machine capable of running Berners-Lee’s graphical World Wide Web browser. Still, the hypertext community wasn’t impressed. “He said you needed an Internet connection,” remembers Cathy Marshall, “and I thought, ‘Well, that’s expensive.’” Wendy Hall took a break from her own demo to try the Web on the conference floor. “I was looking at it,” she remembers, laughing ruefully, “and I’m thinking, ‘These links, they’re embedded in the documents, and they’re only going one way—this is really too simplistic.’”

  They were right. It was expensive. Although Stanford had established the first stateside Web server only three days before, the hotel in San Antonio wasn’t fronting for an Internet connection, so Berners-Lee and Caillau were forced to demo a dummy version of the Web saved on optical disk. And it was too simplistic. Compared with the other systems on display, the Web’s version of hypertext was years behind. Links on the World Wide Web went in only one direction, to a single destination, and they were contextual—tethered to their point of origin—rather than generic, like Wendy’s Microcosm links. Instead of employing a linkbase that could update documents automatically when links were moved or deleted, the Web embedded links in documents themselves. “That was all considered counter to what we were doing at the time,” Cathy adds. “It was kind of like, well: we know better than to do that.”

  Because the demonstrations at Hypertext ’91 were scheduled after all the day’s lectures and discussions, many delegates skipped the session entirely. Reporting after the fact, a contributor to the field’s journal of record, the ACM SIGCHI Bulletin, noted that she had “little energy left to see and understand the demos, let alone try to conduct an intelligent conversation about them.” Of the twenty-one demos on display, she managed to examine only six, one of which was the World Wide Web. In what amounts to little more than a footnote in her trip report, she calls it a “hypertext-like interface” intended for the “High Energy Physics community.”

  Nothing in the proceedings of Hypertext ’91 suggests how quickly the World Wide Web would come to dominate the lives of people all around the world—and indeed, to alter the course of human history. In San Antonio, it was just one of many systems on display, and far from the most sophisticated. It certainly didn’t help that the techno-social activities of Hypertext ’91 featured a tequila fountain in the courtyard outside the hotel. The very moment the World Wide Web was making its American debut, everybody was outside drinking margaritas.

  But the Web suffered little from its snub in Texas. By Hypertext ’93, more than half the demos on display were Web based, and at the European conference on hypertext in ’94, Berners-Lee delivered the keynote address. During that brief window, hypertext and the Web managed an uneasy coexistence. Cathy Marshall proposed that hypertext systems could serve as desktop work spaces for information gathered online, and HyperCard wasn’t pulled from the shelves until 2004. Wendy Hall, who would weather the transition to the Web more successfully than many of her peers, updated Microcosm to include a Web viewer, and she designed versions of her beloved linkbases that could be shared over a distributed network.

  Today, we mostly think of hypertext as being something related to the Web, rather than of the Web as a technically inferior manifestation of hypertext principles. The Web is hypertext’s killer app, just as e-mail was the Internet’s killer app—but its success hit the hypertext community hard. “I’m not sure exactly how to describe it,” Cathy Marshall tells me. “All of a sudden you were the outsider, when you’d been the insider.” At the first World Wide Web conference in 1994, Wendy Hall noticed that many delegates thought the Web was the first hypertext system, and she was stunned to read a paper reinventing her generic link ideas from scratch. By 1997, the two fields were so divergent that the Hypertext and World Wide Web conferences were scheduled for the exact same week.

  To this day, the World Wide Web suffers from problems that systems like Microcosm solved decades ago. Because Web links are entirely dependent on their context, they’re almost impossible to maintain. If a Web site is moved, deleted, or hidden behind a paywall, every link that pointed to it becomes meaningless, dangling like an anchor line cut loose from a ship. This should be familiar to anyone who has spent five minutes browsing the Web: according to a 2013 study, the median life span of a Web page is 9.3 years, a rate of obsolescence that sows rotten links throughout the network over time. We all regularly experience these dead ends, which are called 404 Errors. The document you’re looking for, they tell us, simply cannot be found.

  The hypertext researchers who demoed the World Wide Web back in San Antonio assumed this issue would be the system’s undoing. After all, what good is a hypertext system if the links don’t even work? Further, the Web isn’t constructive. In all of the major pre-Web hypertext systems—Microcosm, NoteCards, Aquanet, VIKI, and Intermedia—creating links was just as important as clicking them. The point was for users to build their own paths through the material, a creative process of forging associative trails that could be shared with others. The Web, however, is a passive medium, a highway we wander without leaving much of a trace.

  The World Wide Web may not have been powerful enough for academics, but a lightweight, user-friendly tool is often more likely to take off than a vastly more powerful one. And while linkbases and constructive hypertext were easily maintained in relatively contained research and classroom environments, or on small networks of computers all running the same operating system, they would have quickly become unmanageable on a global scale. Today, we accept 404 Errors as the cost of doing business, and the Web runs the world.

  MULTICOSM

  The second time I talk to Wendy Hall, she’s finishing up a long day with the department she now chairs at Southampton, the Web Science Institute. As I reach her on Skype, she’s just saying good-bye to the last students trailing out of the conference room where they’ve been meeting. “Claire’s writing a book about me,” she says, laughing, to someone I can’t see, gesturing at my head on the screen. “Or people like me,
anyway.”

  Wendy will be the first to tell you that she’s a very social person. She loves to make connections with people, and between them. When she talks, she does so in long, unselfconscious streams, jumping from one big, seemingly unrelated idea to another on her own invisible tracks—the mark of a true hypertext researcher. She loves science fiction and asks me repeatedly if I’ve read Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy or Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series. These novels contain her go-to analogies: the World Wide Web, she says, is an experiment on the whole world, just like the white mice in Hitchhiker’s Guide, who run through mazes to test the scientists, and trying to understand the Web is like studying Isaac Asimov’s “psychohistory,” a mathematics of social complexity that can predict the rise and fall of galaxies.

  Back in 1991, after drinking her fill of courtyard margaritas in San Antonio, Wendy went back to Southampton to continue developing her multimedia hypertext system, Microcosm. To survive, it needed to adapt to changing times. This it did admirably: for every new form of media, Wendy and her team developed new Microcosm “viewers,” windows through which its users could draw material into their growing personal linkbases. There were Microcosm digital video viewers for video LaserDiscs, viewers for animation, sound, and 3-D models, and viewers for competing hypertext systems. After San Antonio, however, Wendy was careful to add one more: a viewer for the World Wide Web.