Contents in Current Page:

1. Augmentation System - Introduction.
2. Augmentation System - hierarchy
3. Augmentation System - Selection, View, user response, commercial failure

Augmentation System - Introduction.

NLS/Augment (Engelbart, 1968), (Engelbart, 1984) was the first hypertext system  developed in 1960s by Douglas Engelbart group. It represents to a large extend first generation systems. It was an inspired sophisticated system with many  capabilities for browsing the hypertext network for the standards of the day. Nodes were organised into files. Reference links help a user to move from a file to another.  A linked list of links could be specified introducing a primitive path mechanism. NLS/Augment employed user controlled text windows to present information to  the reader. The reader had also the capability to display files with a specified content by enforcing string-based filters. Files in NLS were structured into a  hierarchy of segments called statements, limited to 3000 characters in length. Each statement had an identifier of its level within the file. Reference links could be established between statements within files and between files.

Augmentation System - hierarchy

The Augmentation System team adopted for several years the convention of organizing all information into explicit hierarchical structures, with provision for arbitrary cross-referencing among the elements of a hierarchy. The principal manifestation of this hiearchical structure was the braeking of text into statements, each of which bore a number showing its serial location in the text and its level in an  outline of the text. By convention the first word of a statement was treated as the name of the statement, if it was enclosed in parentheses. References to these names  could be embedded anywhere in other staements. This naming and linking when added to the basic hiearachical structure yielded a flexible, general structuring capability.

Augmentation System - Selection, View, user response, commercial failure

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