Douglas Engelbart's HyperScope 1.0 Launched

ReadWriteWeb writes, "HyperScope 1.0 is a new Web app based on Douglas Engelbart's 1968 NLS/Augment (oNLine System). Engelbart and team have been working on Hyperscope since March of this year in a project funded by the National Science Foundation. Its aim is to rebuild portions of Engelbart's NLS, on the Web, using current Web technologies such as Ajax and DHTML. In effect it gives an advanced browsing experience, including classic hypertext features like indirect links and transclusions of remote pieces of other documents. HyperScope has been completely built with open source JavaScript toolkit Dojo — meaning that everything is done on the client-side."

Actual link

[generic-man]

Actual site: http://hyperscope.org/ [hyperscope.org]

Blog blog blog blog blog, blog blogpost blog blog...

Re:So let me get this straight....

[RuBLed]

If I'm right, it is just one file and to put it simply, it is just like reading an html document with the usual anchor tags, where "sections" (div?) appear and disappear as you read the document. If I'm still right, it would create an illusion that you are reading several pages but in reality, you only made that part of the page visible by clicking on the appropriate "links" or "arrows". The article says everything is client-side so I assume the document is all there.

Re:So let me get this straight....

[TrappedByMyself]

Yeah, I really don't get it either. The little buttons appear even if there is no useful action to take. If the text is expanded, or whatever its doing, you can still click the little page icon. Doing so, it jumps to some other location, then jumps back to somewhere close to where you were, could be the same line, could be a few lines off. If you hit a few lines off, the technology has successfully disoriented you and has given you no way to get back to where you were before.

I guess if the team's goal was to create something which is even more of a navigation nightmare than Flash, well, then, They're Winner!

Re:Wiki?

[ballermann]

Eugene Kim [1] (why didn't the poster give him credit? It's mostly his work, but I guess Doug is just a tid bit more popular) presented the system at WikiSym2006 [2] and did indeed show how to integrate this as additional view into a Wiki (I think he used his PurpleWiki [3])

[1] http://www.eekim.com/blog/ [eekim.com]
[2] http://wikisym.org/ws2006/ [wikisym.org]
[3] http://www.blueoxen.com/tools/purplewiki/ [blueoxen.com]

Re:Now I'll never get to sleep

[velorg]

Where you been sleeping, man?
That hardware (=crucial, number-crunching part of the Mill) was finally implemented waaaay back in 2000 or thereabouts, and is now on display AND running (crank-powered) in The Science Museum in London, UK. Scientific American had a feature on it around then,too. Sorry, no urls.
Along the way, the two "implementers" discovered several "mechanical" errors in Babbage's original drawings, which would have prevented the Engine from fuctioning even had it been built; so they corrected them, and the concept proved viable after all.

It appears to be a web based outliner

[hey!]

Based on approximately 30 seconds clicking through links.

If so it's not a bad idea. If my impression is correct, then think for a moment about this idea:

        hyperscope : wiki :: outliner : word processor

There is no document you can produce in an outliner that cannot be produced in a word processor, whereas there are practically infinite documents you can create in a word processor. Which is what makes an outliner useful. Classification is such a basic and useful mental pattern, putting an amorphous blob of thoughs into the form of an electronic outline goes a lot of the way to organizing it into something coherent.

My experience with wikis is that if you have one really mentally disorganized person with time on his hands, he can quickly turn important parts of the wiki into mush.