Sunday, January 28, 2007

COM125 Week 2: It's 4 AM and I Couldn't Sleep Because I Was Thinking About Hypertext

Although it was just one of many processes that had to be realized during the long road to the creation of today’s Internet, the development of hypertext was undeniably one of the most important. Hypertext is defined by Wikipedia as a way of organizing material in such a manner that overcomes the natural linear restraints of basic traditional text. What does this mean in terms that the average anybody can grasp? Well basically, when speaking of hypertext in terms of computers, by clicking a hyperlink, a user can load a webpage that has either been previously stored in a static location or generated in response to input. Webpages are merely the documents and applications that are stimulated by hyperlinks with the help of a computer network like the Internet. Stated in an even more stripped-down fashion than that, think of a massive all-encompassing encyclopedia that exists somewhere, only you cannot see what you are looking for until you actually take the initiative to tell the encyclopedia to show it to you. Hypertext existed in theory long before it ever actually materialized, mostly due to cost restrictions. Visionaries such as Paul Otlet and H.G. Wells were among the first credited with acknowledging that humans were having a problem with “information overload.” Put simply, there needed to be some sort of universal index that one could easily use to access necessary knowledge about a specific topic. Thus, researchers would not be attempting the same research over and over without realizing that the conclusions to such data was available, yet difficult to find and/or access. Thirty years after the problem was made aware, Ted Nelson and Douglas Engelbart, inspired by Vannevar Bush’s piece “As We May Think,” were credited with the invention of what we currently accept as hypertext. Their systems were slow developing in the early 1960s, and Engelbart’s demonstration of hypertext to the public for the first time didn’t come until 1968. Throughout the 1980s, many different versions of hypertexts came and went as if they were fashion trends. The inability of any of the unique systems to break through with mainstream success opened the door wide open for the next step in history; in the late 1980s, Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web to fulfill the need for information sharing between scientists working on different computers all over the world. The World Wide Web, while failing to incorporate many of the features of past systems, easily became the most famous and widely used example of hypertext after the Web exploded in the mid-1990s. The huge boom in Web servers was largely due to the fact that browser versions were released for both the PC and Macintosh worlds. The first and foremost reason why hypertext is such an important part of our lives is the way, through the use of the Web, the invention has revolutionized how we can search for our information. In using the Internet on almost a daily basis, the majority of the population is interacting with a system that does not receive any of the glory, but does all the work. In other words, when we think of the Internet, we think of specific webpages that we often visit. The webpages contain the flashy art and the stunning colors, the scrolling text and the slideshow of pictures. Next time we access those webpages, however, we should be aware that hypertext and hyperlinks are to those webpages as oil and gasoline are to a car. Without a system that is storing and instantly accessing the data immediately upon request, there is no World Wide Web, but rather a useless Inter-network of linked computers.

Monday, January 22, 2007

First Entry

Hi, my name is Tony Lojacono and this is the first post of my awesome new Com125 blog. I'm a junior COM major at UB with no specific job field in mind at the moment. I try to maintain a good balance in life among school, work, and socializing. I naturally find humor in most things, and sarcasm is my daily hobby. I am looking forward to talking about myself and then being able to read about myself on a weekly basis in this blog.