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.
