In 1990, with a quirky film called Hyperland, the BBC gave the world a glimpse of its technological future.
Hyperland revolves around Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy author Douglas Adams and former Doctor Who star Tom Baker. Baker plays a virtual butler who walks Adams through a global network of interconnected digital files. The film is one part science fiction, one part documentary, and it's filled with all sorts of technological concepts that would come to define the modern world.
First, it touches on Vannevar Bush's Memex, the hypothetical hypertext system Bush proposed in the now legendary Atlantic article "As We May Think." It revisits Douglas Englebart's Mother of All Demoes, which gave the world its first glimpse of hypertext, online collaboration, and even the mouse. And it examines Ted Nelson's ambitious Xanadu project, a conceptual forerunner to the web we know and love today.
One conspicuous absence is the world wide web itself. That's likely because although Tim Berners Lee first proposed the web in 1989, it wasn't until August of 1991 that the first web server was available to the public.
Besides those names, which you'd expect to find in any history of hypertext, the film it goes in some unexpected directions as well. It looks into Robert Winter's work in music visualization, Robert Abel's Hypercard, a graphics technology based exploration of Pablo Picco's Guernica, and so much more. It touches on the idea of live streaming, virtual reality, and artificial intelligence. The weird electric vehicle the Sinclair C5 even makes a cameo appearance in trash heap about a minute and a half into the video.
As prescient as the film was, however, it doesn't look much like the modern web. Instead, the system in Hyperland is based mostly on videos, which was probably a result of the era's infatuation with interactive CD-ROMs. And then there's the virtual butler, which remains far outside of our technological capabilities.
But now that YouTube has integrated hyperlinks between videos, Oculus has made virtual reality more practical, and companies ranging from Microsoft to Apple to startups like Viv are trying to foster truly intelligent virtual assistants, the world of Hyperland may finally come to pass.
