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Introduction “I’ve seen things you people wouldn't believe… Attack ships on fire off the shores of Orion… I watched C-Beams glitter in the dark near the Tanhauser Gate. All those moments will be lost… like tears in rain." Roy Batty, Blade Runner(1982) The question of Linearity and Non-Linearity is an issue that has been occupying hypermedia and multimedia designers since the earliest beginnings of the industry. Indeed the idea of non-linear access to texts predates the appearance of the computer itself by almost forty years. Vanovar Bush’s Memex system in 1945 was perhaps the first system to recognize the potential of storing large amounts of information with non-sequential links between various parts. Ted Nelson further explored the idea in the sixties and seventies, with his Zanadu project to link all of humanities literary works. Although neither of these projects was ever built in the way their creator’s intended (“Memex” was based around huge libraries of microfilm), they laid the foundations for the first multimedia systems that arrived with the Macintosh and Hypercard in 1984. Linearity can best be described as a structure or text that progresses from a start to a definite end, along a strait line, hence “Linear”. Non-Linear structures are described as those that do not necessarily have a prescribed starting point, or path through the text. The reader has the ability to choose their journey through the text. As to how much non-linearity is a myth, is a question I intend to come back to later. |
Mumbling V9.0.1
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