15/183.2.8 The First Hypertext Conference (1987)
In 1987 the first conference on hypertext, ACM Hypertext'87, was held at the University of North Carolina. Half of the 500 people who wanted to join the conference had to be turned away, and the others were squeezed into two auditoriums which were connected by video transmission [Nie95].
During subsequent years new projects and hypermedia systems were announced nearly monthly [And96a]. The World Wide WWW (WWW, W3, or The WWW), developed at CERN (the European Particle Physics Laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland), was first demonstrated at the ACM Hypertext'91 conference in December 91. Its breakthrough did not come until the year 1993 when the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) released Mosaic, a point-and-click graphical browser for the WWW. The World Wild WWW will be discussed in the next Section.
In 1994 the first Hyper-G server, developed at Graz University of Technology, was released. Hyper-G is built upon the WWW but overcame some of its shortcomings by implementing new features inspired by Ted Nelson's Xanadu and Intermedia. Hyper-G supports full-text search, bidirectional links, user rights, etc. The last section in this chapter is devoted to Hyperwave, which is the name of the commercial version of Hyper-G.