zlacker

My friend was working on the browser team and showed me a demo one time when we stopped by his work. It was a picture with text around it, which you could already do with WordPerfect and Word? So can we go do that thing now?

The following summer I applied to work there. I did not miss the next several shifts in the market, but eventually got tired of chasing them.

>>hinkle+(OP)
I first saw this on a Sparcstation in our college lab that had a giant monochrome display. Even though the functionality was not necessarily novel compared to latex or wordperfect or other local programs, what really blew me away is that the source format was an open standard you could pull up from IETF, you could inspect it and copy it and modify it, etc. After having spent a lot of time trying to reverse engineer .doc and other types of software this just felt like such a gift and I was instantly converted. I was in that first generation where everyone had a homepage in their home directory that anyone else in the world could visit since there were no firewalls and all computers had public IPs.

I ended up going to grad school instead of jumping on the gravy train. Still kicking myself for that to this day :-)

>>foobar+Fb
I think that HTML was a product of the exact time it was invented, it matched the point that some computers became fast enough to parse a text source format on the fly.

I wrote an online hypertext system in 1985, but the storage format was optimized to make it as efficient to transfer and display as possible and was not easy to author. It ran on top of the GEM GUI and you could click on a word that had been defined as a link to take you to the target page.

Someone could also have defined a rich-text schema in ASN.1 in the late 80s then written an application to retrieve data in this format from a remote server over an OSI network and display it. Interfacing the typical public text database of the time to this would have been a lot of work, they just expected to output to a terminal.