retrocomputing @lemmy.sdf.org Paolo Amoroso @lemmy.ml 1y ago

Hyper-G

ftp.isds.tugraz.at /pub/papers/report364.pdf

Hyper-G was a distributed hypermedia system developed at the Graz University of Technology in Austria, overshadowed by the World Wide Web and now long forgotten. See this PDF overview article: Hyper-G: A Large Universal Hypermedia System and Some Spin-Offs.

10 comments

Direct linking PDFs isn't cool.
- Apologies, I didn't know. Can you please elaborate on why?
  
  I believe it is because it can automatically (depending on the browser) start a download…
- I disagree. I don't think it's the world's responsibility to cater to someone's bad browser configuration.
The big difference between [the WWW] and Hyper-G is Hyper-G's distributed link server. This server keeps track of all the relations (e.g. links) between Hyper-G objects, allowing for automatic maintenance of the information network. For example, when an object gets deleted, the link server will be able to find and delete all links pointing to the object. In contrast, in Gopher and WWW there is no easy way to find out what other documents are pointing to a given document

Dear God that sounds horrible and amazing. I'm glad it didn't catch on, but I really want to see it in action.
- The first sentence made me think that maybe it's something ideologically similar to IPFS and Locutus, but yes, horrible.
- Such a feature was relatively common on desktop and workstation hypermedia systems.

10 comments