1/42.2.2.1 COSTOC
In 1986 three groups of computer scientists world-wide started to develop the COSTOC database [MMO87], a database for CAI courseware, mainly used for the production of university level computer science courses. COSTOC is an example for presentation-type CAI (PT-CAI), a hybrid of traditional frame-oriented CAI and information-structured CAI. The aim of PT-CAI is to make the authoring and maintenance of courseware as simple as possible.In 1988 the COSTOC database contained some 250 lessons in computer science, both in English and German language [HMM89]. Today the database contains about 500 lessons, not only in computer science but other subjects like medical sciences. Student labs usually consisted of one PC as file server and a number of PCs, which connected to the file server via LAN or another network, for students.
In 1989 COSTOC was expanded to HyperCOSTOC, which introduced the features of hypermedia (see next paragraph and Section 3) to the COSTOC database.