2/123.4.1 History
In 1989, the idea of developing the ``optimal large-scale hypermedia system'', code-named Hyper-G [Kap96], was born at the Institute for Computer Science and Computer Supported New Media (IICM![[*]](/Teaching/theses/1997/_idbde_/rpersche/images/foot_motif.gif)
) at Graz University of Technology by
Hermann Maurer, Ivan Tomek, and Fritz Huber. This was about the same time as
the development of the World Wide WWW began. In 1990, when the project
received funding by the Austrian Ministry of Science, Frank Kappe
established the architectural design for Hyper-G in his PhD thesis. Together
with another programmer Kappe developed the first text-based Hyper-G
browser, HGTV (Hyper-G Terminal Viewer).
Since 1992 graphical browsers for XWindows (Harmony) and for Windows (Amadeus) have been developed by the Hyper-G team, which had reached the level of 65 personnel in 1995. These are both viewers and authoring tools. Due to the enormous growth of the World Wide WWW, Hyper-G's gateway to the WWW (WaveMaster), which allows the use of a WWW browser like Netscape Navigator as a Hyper-G client, has been perfected.
Since 1996 Hyper-G has been a commercial product, and because of a trademark conflict, it has changed its name to Hyperwave. It is now seen as a second-generation WWW solution, rather than a totally different hypermedia system. A detailed description can be found in [Mau96a].