Just published on Medium- Leopardi was a great Italian poet: a few people know that he invented the first hypertext
https://medium.com/philosophytoday/the-first-hypertext-was-italian-9162a41d902a
#hypertext #poetry #leopardi #Italy #thinking #intelligence #AI
As I've mentioned a few times on this blog, I've long had a bit of a thing for writing tools for reading the content of Norton Guide files. I first used Norton Guides back in the early 1990s thanks to the release of Clipper 5, and later on in that decade I wrote my first couple of tools to turn guides into HTML (and also write a Windows-based reader, then rewrote it, wrote one for OS/2, wrote one for GNU/Linux, and so on). One tool (ng2html) got used by a few sites on the 'net to publish all sorts of guides, but it's not something I ever got into doing myself. Amusingly, from time to time, because I had a credit on those sites as the author of the conversion tool, I'd get random emails from people hoping I could help them with the topic of whatever guide they'd been reading. Sometimes I could help, often not. From what I've recently been told two of the biggest sites for this sort of thing (they might even have been the same site, or one a copy of the other, I didn't really dive into them too much and wasn't sure who was behind them anyway) have long since gone offline. This means that, as far as I can tell, a huge collection of knowledge from the DOS days is a lot harder to get to, if it hasn't disappeared altogether. This makes me kind of sad. So I had an idea: having recently polished up my replacement for ng2html, why not use that to build my own site that publishes the guides I have? So I set about it. There's one wrinkle to this though. While the other sites seemed to just publish every NG file they got their hands on, I'd prefer to try and do it like this: publish every guide I have in my collection that I have a licence or permission to publish; or as near as possible1 Given all of this, norton-guides.davep.dev has been born. The repository that drives it is on GitHub, and I have a wiki page that lists all the guides I have that I could possibly publish, showing what I know about the copyright/licence of each one and what the publishing state is. So with this, I'm putting out a call for help: if you remember the days of Norton Guide help files, if you have Norton Guide help files I don't have, and especially if you are the copyright-holder of any of these files and you can extend me the permission to open them up, or if you know the right people and can get me in touch with them, DROP ME A LINE! I'd also love to have others join me in this... quest. So if you want to contribute to the repository and help build it up I'd also love to hear from you. I will possibly be a little permissive when it comes to things that I believe contain public domain information to start with. ↩
I'm building an online #NortonGuide collection, in the hope of preserving all those handy help files we used to work with back in the #MSDOS days. Can you help?
https://blog.davep.org/2025/12/12/norton-guide-collection.html
As I've mentioned a few times on this blog, I've long had a bit of a thing for writing tools for reading the content of Norton Guide files. I first used Norton Guides back in the early 1990s thanks to the release of Clipper 5, and later on in that decade I wrote my first couple of tools to turn guides into HTML (and also write a Windows-based reader, then rewrote it, wrote one for OS/2, wrote one for GNU/Linux, and so on). One tool (ng2html) got used by a few sites on the 'net to publish all sorts of guides, but it's not something I ever got into doing myself. Amusingly, from time to time, because I had a credit on those sites as the author of the conversion tool, I'd get random emails from people hoping I could help them with the topic of whatever guide they'd been reading. Sometimes I could help, often not. From what I've recently been told two of the biggest sites for this sort of thing (they might even have been the same site, or one a copy of the other, I didn't really dive into them too much and wasn't sure who was behind them anyway) have long since gone offline. This means that, as far as I can tell, a huge collection of knowledge from the DOS days is a lot harder to get to, if it hasn't disappeared altogether. This makes me kind of sad. So I had an idea: having recently polished up my replacement for ng2html, why not use that to build my own site that publishes the guides I have? So I set about it. There's one wrinkle to this though. While the other sites seemed to just publish every NG file they got their hands on, I'd prefer to try and do it like this: publish every guide I have in my collection that I have a licence or permission to publish; or as near as possible1 Given all of this, norton-guides.davep.dev has been born. The repository that drives it is on GitHub, and I have a wiki page that lists all the guides I have that I could possibly publish, showing what I know about the copyright/licence of each one and what the publishing state is. So with this, I'm putting out a call for help: if you remember the days of Norton Guide help files, if you have Norton Guide help files I don't have, and especially if you are the copyright-holder of any of these files and you can extend me the permission to open them up, or if you know the right people and can get me in touch with them, DROP ME A LINE! I'd also love to have others join me in this... quest. So if you want to contribute to the repository and help build it up I'd also love to hear from you. I will possibly be a little permissive when it comes to things that I believe contain public domain information to start with. ↩
Werkzeug >> Tool
Light pen, colorized photo
IBM 2250 vector CRT display
Hypertext Editing System (1969)
Brown University
Providence RI USA
OK, so @milliesquilly gave a shoutout to Beny Danette which helped me discover this #HyperText competition winner made in a 12 hour creative sprint!
https://benydanette.itch.io/computer
Meanwhile, in a testament to the versatility of #Decker, @ribose created this science themed deck:
https://ribozone.itch.io/cell-culture
(do check out their equally gorgeous website https://ribo.zone/)
Inspired by the prodigious self-titled #decker zine queen @milliesquilly:
https://zine.milliesquilly.com/
@noracodes made a #zine in Decker:
https://nora.codes/post/infrastructure-photography-manifesto-and-decker-in-html/
which got shared by @alcinnz and that’s where I discovered Decker, a platform that builds on the old-school interactive feel of #Hypercard and rocks that Classic MacOS look:
https://beyondloom.com/decker/
There's even a #Twine integration! Time for some non-linear, interactive #storytelling, #HyperText style.
What is Gemini?
I made a zine in Decker, about why taking pictures of "ugly" things like power lines and train tracks feels meaningful to me. Also, I figured how to embed a Decker deck in a web page without an iframe!
https://nora.codes/post/infrastructure-photography-manifesto-and-decker-in-html/
For me the Bible is the original hyper text. Thomas Pynchon works is linear but becomes a hypertext in how the reader relates to it. Hopscotch is structured like a tree with optional fruit and choose your path game books have problem of character by the interaction of choice but have a nice complex shape in time showing complex structure.
My current idea involves a collection Pynchon like short stories but in Bible like library for a complex shape in time.
"A List Of Text-Only & Minimalist News Sites" is like a peek into an alternate timeline, where the web evolved in a different direction. Where it became functional and friction-free instead of bloated and annoying.
Martino Sacchi
Dave Pearson
Dave Pearson
Greg Lloyd
Stephen
tomasino
Nora, dreamer quintet
Drew
Western Infidels