The US military decided in the Cold War that if their systems were centralised the russians could knock em out in one hit so they decided to decentralise everything. The theory ws that if one part of the system was knocked out or stopped sending data without a reason the top brass were to assume that they had been attacked. Being new technology i guess there were a lot of false alarms. Anyway out of this grew BBS's and then ISP's and then HTTP's and FTP's for Mr Public. Hypertext has been around longer than the net anyway. A guy by the name of Vannevar Bush wrote an article discussing the need of new ways to access information, this was in 1945. The term hypertext was first used in 1965 by Ted Nelson who applied the theory to a computer based information retrieval system. Hypertext systems hit the public in 1987 when Apple released HyperCard for its own computers.

And yes you are right, the miltary system was based around numbers of course because thats how computers operate (they dont think, they have no intelligence, they just do what the program tells them to do).


[Edited by Harrild on 08-08-2000 at 03:18 AM]