''Hyperland'' is a 50-minute-long documentary film about

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 ...

and surrounding technologies. It was written by

Douglas Adams Douglas Noel Adams (11 March 1952 – 11 May 2001) was an English author, humorist, and screenwriter, best known as the creator of ''The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy''. Originally a 1978 BBC radio comedy, ''The Hitchhiker's Guide to the ...

and produced and directed by Max Whitby for

BBC Two BBC Two is a British free-to-air Public service broadcasting in the United Kingdom, public broadcast television channel owned and operated by the BBC. It is the corporation's second flagship channel, and it covers a wide range of subject matte ...

in 1990. It stars Douglas Adams as a computer user and

Tom Baker Thomas Stewart Baker (born 20 January 1934) is an English actor and writer. He is best known for having played the Fourth Doctor, fourth and longest-serving incarnation of The Doctor (Doctor Who), the Doctor in the science fiction television ...

, with whom Adams had already worked on ''

Doctor Who ''Doctor Who'' is a British science fiction television series broadcast by the BBC since 1963. The series, created by Sydney Newman, C. E. Webber and Donald Wilson (writer and producer), Donald Wilson, depicts the adventures of an extraterre ...

'', as a personification of a

software agent In computer science, a software agent is a computer program that acts for a user or another program in a relationship of agency. The term ''agent'' is derived from the Latin ''agere'' (to do): an agreement to act on one's behalf. Such "action on ...

. In hindsight, what ''Hyperland'' describes and predicts is an approximation of today's

World Wide Web The World Wide Web (WWW or simply the Web) is an information system that enables Content (media), content sharing over the Internet through user-friendly ways meant to appeal to users beyond Information technology, IT specialists and hobbyis ...

Content

The self-proclaimed "fantasy documentary" begins with Adams asleep by the fireside with his television still on. In a dream that follows, Adams, fed up by game shows and generally passive, non-interactive linear content, takes his TV to a rubbish dump, where he meets Tom, played by Tom Baker. Tom is a

, who shows him the future of TV: ''interactive multimedia''. Much like

Apple Inc Apple Inc. is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Cupertino, California, in Silicon Valley. It is best known for its consumer electronics, software, and services. Founded in 1976 as Apple Computer ...

's Knowledge Navigator concept, Tom acts as a butler within a virtual space populated with

hypermedia Hypermedia, an extension of hypertext, is a nonlinear medium of information that includes graphics, audio, video, plain text and hyperlinks. This designation contrasts with the broader term ''multimedia'', which may include non-interactive linear ...

: linked text, sound, pictures and movies represented by animated icons. The documentary is centred on Adams browsing these media and discovering their interconnectedness. This process leads him, for example, from the topic ''Atlantic Ocean'' to ''literature about the sea'' to ''

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner ''The Rime of the Ancient Mariner'' (originally ''The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere''), written by English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge in 1797–98 and published in 1798 in the first edition of '' Lyrical Ballads'', is a poem that recounts th ...

'' by

Samuel Taylor Coleridge Samuel Taylor Coleridge ( ; 21 October 177225 July 1834) was an English poet, literary critic, philosopher, and theologian who was a founder of the Romantic Movement in England and a member of the Lake Poets with his friend William Wordsworth ...

to the poem ''

Kubla Khan "Kubla Khan: or A Vision in a Dream" () is a poem written by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, completed in 1797 and published in 1816. It is sometimes given the subtitles "A Vision in a Dream" and "A Fragment." According to Coleridge's preface to "Kub ...

'' by the same author to '' Xanadu'' and back to the topic of hypertext via

Ted Nelson Theodor Holm Nelson (born June 17, 1937) is an American pioneer of information technology, philosopher, and sociologist. He coined the terms ''hypertext'' and ''hypermedia'' in 1963 and published them in 1965. According to his 1997 ''Forbes'' p ...

's ''

Project Xanadu Project Xanadu ( ) was the first hypertext project, founded in 1960 by Ted Nelson. Administrators of Project Xanadu have declared it superior to the World Wide Web, with the mission statement: "Today's popular software simulates paper. The World ...

''. The references to Coleridge and to Kubla Khan are rather knowing nods to Adams' own book ''

Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency ''Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency'' is a humorous detective novel by English writer Douglas Adams, published in 1987. It is described by the author on its cover as a "thumping good detective-ghost-horror-who dunnit-time travel-romanti ...

'', where they play significant roles in the plot. ''Dirk Gently'' was published in 1987 and also touches on the themes of interconnectedness, suggesting that this was a subject Adams had thought about at some length and for some time. Many aspects of the documentary demonstrate Adams' noted enthusiasm for technology, and for

Apple An apple is a round, edible fruit produced by an apple tree (''Malus'' spp.). Fruit trees of the orchard or domestic apple (''Malus domestica''), the most widely grown in the genus, are agriculture, cultivated worldwide. The tree originated ...

computers in particular. At the beginning of the documentary a

Macintosh Portable The Macintosh Portable is a portable computer that was designed, manufactured, and sold by Apple Computer, Inc. from September 1989 to October 1991. It is the first battery-powered Macintosh, which garnered significant excitement from critic ...

can be seen, and most of the projects presented run on Apple hardware. Even the general design of the animated icons and environments featured in his dream is inspired by pre-OS X era

Mac OS Mac operating systems were developed by Apple Inc. in a succession of two major series. In 1984, Apple debuted the operating system that is now known as the classic Mac OS with its release of the original Macintosh System Software. The system ...

icons and design cues.

Multimedia

While Adams is browsing, many people and projects related to the general theme of hypertext and

multimedia Multimedia is a form of communication that uses a combination of different content forms, such as Text (literary theory), writing, Sound, audio, images, animations, or video, into a single presentation. T ...

are presented: *

Vannevar Bush Vannevar Bush ( ; March 11, 1890 – June 28, 1974) was an American engineer, inventor and science administrator, who during World War II, World War II headed the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD), through which almo ...

and his

Memex A memex (from "memory expansion") is a hypothetical electromechanical device for interacting with microform documents and described in Vannevar Bush's 1945 article " As We May Think". Bush envisioned the memex as a device in which individuals w ...

concept of a theoretical proto-hypertext information system are shown. *

explains

and

. * Hans Peter Brøndmo talks about the concept of animated navigation icons, which he calls ''Micons''. * Robert Winter talks about an interactive version of Beethoven's 9th Symphony. * An idea from

Kurt Vonnegut Kurt Vonnegut ( ; November 11, 1922 – April 11, 2007) was an American author known for his Satire, satirical and darkly humorous novels. His published work includes fourteen novels, three short-story collections, five plays, and five nonfict ...

's book ''Palm Sunday'' is presented: stories and narrative

structures A structure is an arrangement and organization of interrelated elements in a material object or system, or the object or system so organized. Material structures include man-made objects such as buildings and machines and natural objects such as ...

have shapes that can be represented mathematically as graphs. * Robert Abel shows his multimedia version of

Pablo Picasso Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso (25 October 1881 – 8 April 1973) was a Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, Ceramic art, ceramicist, and Scenic ...

's '' Guernica''. * Apple Multimedia Lab employees Steve Gano, Kristee Kreitman, Kristina Hooper, Michael Naimark and Fabrice Florin talk about a multimedia version of '' Life Story'', a

BBC The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) is a British public service broadcaster headquartered at Broadcasting House in London, England. Originally established in 1922 as the British Broadcasting Company, it evolved into its current sta ...

TV film dramatisation of the 1953 discovery of the structure of DNA. * Amanda Goodenough presents ''Inigo Gets Out'', an

interactive story Across the many fields concerned with interactivity, including information science, computer science, human-computer interaction, communication, and industrial design, there is little agreement over the meaning of the term "interactivity", but mo ...

for children implemented with

Hypercard HyperCard is a application software, software application and software development kit, development kit for Apple Macintosh and Apple IIGS computers. It is among the first successful hypermedia systems predating the World Wide Web. HyperCard com ...

. * Brad deGraf and Michael Wahrman talk about their digital puppet ''Mike Normal''. * A

NASA Ames Research Center The Ames Research Center (ARC), also known as NASA Ames, is a major NASA research center at Moffett Federal Airfield in California's Silicon Valley. It was founded in 1939 as the second National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) laborat ...

scientist presents a prototype

virtual reality Virtual reality (VR) is a Simulation, simulated experience that employs 3D near-eye displays and pose tracking to give the user an immersive feel of a virtual world. Applications of virtual reality include entertainment (particularly video gam ...

helmet called ''Cyberiad''. * Marc Canter makes a cameo (non-)appearance as an animated icon that isn't "clicked" by Adams; no interview with Canter is shown. The dream (and the documentary) ends with a vision of how information might be accessed in 2005. In hindsight, ''Hyperland'' does describe a number of features of the modern web and, apart from some underestimates of graphics and processing power available, the documentary paints a not inaccurate picture of hypermedia and

and how they are used today. This is especially noteworthy considering that it predates the public release of the first Web browser by about a year.

References

External links

Douglas Adams Homepage about ''Hyperland''

Watch and download ''Hyperland'' at the Internet Archive.
* {{Douglas Adams BBC television documentaries Hypertext Films about virtual reality Multimedia Television episodes written by Douglas Adams 1990 television specials Documentary films about the Internet British electronic literature works