OMG! I just reinvented hyperlinking! · AI Pro Writers Studio

OMG! I just reinvented hyperlinking!

Well, not really but thats the way it felt. Is anyone else old enough and was a web wanderer in the early days of Darpa and the lynx hyperlink browser? This is PRE-html and pretty web pages. If not...

Gather 'round the campfire kiddies and I'll tell you a tale of the days of yore when the internet was a baby (yes this is VASTLY over simplified and mostly from memory):

So back in 1992, some Kansas guys realized that documents were just sitting in boring lists, and nobody wanted to jump between them—so Lou had this mad idea: what if you could just click on words and they'd take you somewhere else? He stitched together a simple format where you wrap text in angle brackets and point it at another file, like <cs200@server>Click Here and BAM, you're looking at a completely different document. It was genius because it meant information didn't have to live in one place anymore—you could have a course catalog on one computer, the course details on another, and just link them together like you were connecting dots.

The coolest part was these dots could be at any military base or university linked to the arpanet what was originally Darpa. So when set of click throughs could take you to multiple locations around the world linking one keyword to another. On the personal side we were dialing into BBS systems to get access to telnet and this funny browser named lynx to get home access. Then as always happens a couple of big corporations like The Source, and Compuserve and others came along to commercialize it and make it easier to get online. Then AOL started sending us free frisbees in the mail to get everyone to jump on.

Then someone said "Hey, there's this thing called the Web doing something similar," and Lou basically grafted it all into their system, and suddenly hypertext stopped being this cute local experiment and became the way we'd organize all human knowledge forever. Turns out you do not need graphics to browse the internet—which honestly, sometimes makes you wonder if we went the wrong direction.

******

Why is this relevant? Because I was creating a new QuickStart Document and trying to figure out how to add video to it and had Claude create one from the codebase. Well he has a standing rule about the manual and created it as a manual chapter with links that jump to the github repo for the code, which is private and you can't see it (nyah , nyah). So I asked "Can we create a linking system between books? Or even words or anchors (and this is when the hammer hit me in the head, yeah like the old hypertext links) OMG! OMG! YES! hypertext links between book files, especially for local documentation here, but what this really does is getting use one step closer to branching fiction, better known as Choose your own adventure stories and visual novels!

This is what happens when I get a couple of dedicated days to work here instead of splitting focus with another job.

2 comments

OMG! I just reinvented hyperlinking!