Intermedia was the third notable

hypertext Hypertext is E-text, text displayed on a computer display or other electronic devices with references (hyperlinks) to other text that the reader can immediately access. Hypertext documents are interconnected by hyperlinks, which are typic ...

project to emerge from

Brown University Brown University is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in Providence, Rhode Island, United States. It is the List of colonial colleges, seventh-oldest institution of higher education in the US, founded in 1764 as the ' ...

, after HES (1967) and FRESS (1969). Intermedia was started in 1985 by Norman Meyrowitz, who had been associated with sooner hypertext research at Brown. The Intermedia project coincided with the establishment of the Institute for Research in Information and Scholarship (IRIS). Some of the materials that came from Intermedia, authored by Meyrowitz, Nancy Garrett, and Karen Catlin were used in the development of HTML. Intermedia ran on

A/UX A/UX is a Unix-based operating system from Apple Computer for Macintosh computers, integrated with System 7's graphical interface and application compatibility. It is Apple's first official Unix-based operating system, launched in 1988 and disc ...

version 1.1. Intermedia was programmed using an object-oriented toolkit and standard

DBMS In computing, a database is an organized collection of data or a type of data store based on the use of a database management system (DBMS), the software that interacts with end users, applications, and the database itself to capture and ana ...

functions. Intermedia supported bi-directional, dual-anchor links for both text and graphics. Small icons are used as anchor markers. Intermedia properties include author, creation date, title, and keywords. Link information is stored by the system apart from the source text. More than one such set of data can be kept, which allows each user to have their own "web" of information. Intermedia has complete multi-user support, with three levels of access rights: read, write, and annotate, which is similar to

Unix Unix (, ; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multi-user computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, a ...

permissions. As promising as Intermedia was, it used a lot of resources for its time (it required 4 MB of

RAM Ram, ram, or RAM most commonly refers to: * A male sheep * Random-access memory, computer memory * Ram Trucks, US, since 2009 ** List of vehicles named Dodge Ram, trucks and vans ** Ram Pickup, produced by Ram Trucks Ram, ram, or RAM may also ref ...

and 80 MB of

hard drive A hard disk drive (HDD), hard disk, hard drive, or fixed disk is an electro-mechanical data storage device that stores and retrieves digital data using magnetic storage with one or more rigid rapidly rotating hard disk drive platter, pla ...

space in 1989). It was also highly tied to A/UX, a less popular Unix-like operating system that ran on

Apple Macintosh Mac is a brand of personal computers designed and marketed by Apple Inc., Apple since 1984. The name is short for Macintosh (its official name until 1999), a reference to the McIntosh (apple), McIntosh apple. The current product lineup inclu ...

computers; thus, it wasn't very portable. In 1991, changes in A/UX and lack of funding ended the Intermedia project.

References

# L. Nancy Garrett and Karen E. Smith. "Building a Timeline Editor from Prefab Parts: The Architecture of an Object-Oriented Application". ACM Proceedings of OOPSLA ’86 (September 1986). # L. Nancy Garrett, Norman Meyrowitz, and Karen E. Smith. "Intermedia: Issues, Strategies, and Tactics in the Design of a Hypermedia System". ACM Proceedings of the Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (December 1986). # Nicole Yankelovich, Karen E. Smith, L. Nancy Garrett and Norman Meyrowitz. "Issues in Designing a Hypermedia Document System: The Intermedia Case Study" in Learning Tomorrow: Journal of the Apple Education Advisory Council, n3 p35-87 Spring 1987. # Karen E. Smith and Stanley B. Zdonik. "Intermedia: A case study of the differences between relational and object-oriented database systems". ACM SIGPLAN Notices, Volume 22, Issue 12 (December 1987) Pages: 452 - 465. # L. Nancy Garrett, Julie Launhardt, and Karen Smith Catlin. "Hypermedia Templates: An Author’s Tool". ACM Proceedings of Hypertext ‘91 (December 1991). # Paul Kahn. "Linking Together Books: Experiments in Adapting Published Materials into Intermedia Documents " in Hypermedia and Literary Studies, Paul Delany and George P. Landow (editors). The MIT Press (March 19, 1994) {{ISBN, 0-262-54073-8 # The History of Hypertext by Jacob Nielsen (February 1, 1995), https://www.nngroup.com/articles/hypertext-history/ (accessed 1/31/2017) # Brown University Department of Computer Science. (May 23, 2019)
A Half-Century of Hypertext at Brown: A Symposium
Hypertext Hypermedia Computer-related introductions in 1985

External links

Video of Norman Meyrowitz demonstrating Intermedia at ACM HUMAN’20 conference, Dec 2020

See also

References

External links