The Electronic Document System (EDS) was an early
hypertext
Hypertext is 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 typicall ...
system – also known as the Interactive Graphical Documents (IGD) hypermedia system – focused on creation of interactive documents such as equipment repair manuals or computer-aided instruction texts with embedded links and graphics. EDS was a 1978–1981 research project at
Brown University by Steven Feiner, Sandor Nagy and
Andries van Dam
Andries "Andy" van Dam (born December 8, 1938) is a Dutch-American professor of computer science and former vice-president for research at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. Together with Ted Nelson he contributed to the first hy ...
.
EDS used a dedicated Ramtech raster display and
VAX-11/780
The VAX-11 is a discontinued family of 32-bit superminicomputers, running the Virtual Address eXtension (VAX) instruction set architecture (ISA), developed and manufactured by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). Development began in 1976. In ad ...
computer to create and navigate a network of graphic pages containing interactive graphic buttons. Graphic buttons had programmed behaviors such as invoking an animation, linking to another page, or exposing an additional level of detail.
The system had three automatically created navigation aids:
# a timeline showing thumbnail images of pages traversed;
# a 'neighbors' display showing thumbnails of all pages linking to the current page on the left, and all pages reachable from the current page on the right;
# a visual display of thumbnail page images arranged by page keyword, color coded by chapter.
Unlike most hypertext systems, EDS incorporated state variables associated with each page. For example, clicking a button indicating a particular hardware fault might set a state variable that would expose a new set of buttons with links to a relevant choice of diagnostic pages. The EDS model prefigured graphic hypertext systems such as Apple's
HyperCard
HyperCard is a software application and development kit for Apple Macintosh and Apple IIGS computers. It is among the first successful hypermedia systems predating the World Wide Web.
HyperCard combines a flat-file database with a graphical, ...
.
References
*van Dam, Andries. (1988, July)
Hypertext '87 keynote address ''
Communications of the ACM
''Communications of the ACM'' is the monthly journal of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). It was established in 1958, with Saul Rosen as its first managing editor. It is sent to all ACM members.
Articles are intended for readers with ...
'', 31, 887–895.
*Feiner, Steven; Nagy, Sandor; van Dam, Andries. (1981)
An integrated system for creating and presenting complex computer-based documents SIGGRAPH Proceedings of the 8th annual conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques, Dallas Texas.
* {{cite journal , last = Feiner , first = Steven , title = Authoring large hypermedia documents with IGD , journal = Electronic Publishing , volume = 3 , issue = 1 , date=February 1990 , pages = 29–46 , citeseerx = 10.1.1.46.5607
*Brown University Department of Computer Science. (2019, 23 May)
A Half-Century of Hypertext at Brown: A Symposium
Hypertext
Brown University
History of human–computer interaction