Hyperland

Today's lecture put me in mind of a documentary I watched a while ago. Thanks to the wonder of Gooogle Video, I can share it with you.


"This is a fantasy documentary. The pioneering work shown in Hyperland, however, is very real."

Hyperland is a documentary from 1990, written by Douglas Adams and featuring fourth Doctor Tom Baker. It talks about a hypothetical future of interactive multimedia, where the world's information is collected and organized with hyperlinks. Tom Baker plays a smart agent, who helps Douglas Adams to make sense of the information available to him. The vision of the world wide web is highly visual and has a lot of video elements. This could have been to make it interesting for television, but it also makes it even cooler that I'm watching it on Google Video.

I haven't watched the whole thing in months, but about six minutes in, there was a list of hypothetical names for the world wide web that I quite fancied:

Dynabook
Hyperspace
Cyberia
Infinite Virtual Address Space
Intelligent TV
Interactive Television
Interactive Multimedia
Hypertext

It's hard for me to tell, in retrospect, which of these were meant to be facetious, if any.

Interview with Ted Nelson at 8:05. Vannevar Bush and Memex segment at 9:30. The whole thing is worth watching.