Intermedia was the third notable hypertext project to emerge from Brown University, after HES (1967) and FRESS (1969). Intermedia was started in 1985 by Norman Meyrowitz, who had been associated with earlier 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 Apple Computer's Unix-based operating system for Macintosh computers, integrated with System 7's graphical interface and application compatibility. Launched in 1988 and discontinued in 1995 with version 3.1.1, it is Apple's first officia ...

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

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 may refer to: Animals * A male sheep * Ram cichlid, a freshwater tropical fish People * Ram (given name) * Ram (surname) * Ram (director) (Ramsubramaniam), an Indian Tamil film director * RAM (musician) (born 1974), Dutch * ...

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 platters coated with magne ...

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

Apple Macintosh The Mac (known as Macintosh until 1999) is a family of personal computers designed and marketed by Apple Inc., Apple Inc. Macs are known for their ease of use and minimalist designs, and are popular among students, creative professionals, and ...

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