FRESS was a continuation of work done on van Dam's previous hypertext system, HES, developed the previous year.
FRESS was essentially a text-based system, and unlike the modern Web, editing links was a fairly complex task (unless you had access to the PDS-1 terminal, in which case you could select each end with the lightpen and create a link with a couple keystrokes.
FRESS was heavily used for instructional computing (probably being the foundation for the first hypertext systems used in education, particularly for teaching poetry and biology), as well as typesetting many books.
en.wikipedia.org /wiki/FRESS (615 words)
FRESS(Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-22)
FRESS was essentially a text only system (links could be made to some graphics when using an IMLAC PDS-ID display) and was developed under the VM/CMS time-sharing system in the late 1960's as a successor to the Hypertext Editing System.23 The system contained important "navigational," or linking, facilities.
FRESS allowed authors to attach "keywords" to links, thus providing a facility for readers to filter the information through which they wished to browse, and allowed users to name blocks of text for subsequent referencing and searching.
FRESS was used in production for more than a decade at Brown for both on-line documents and hard-copy manuscript production.
FRESS was the second system in the long and honorable history of Brown University hypermedia research.
FRESS was not only a hypermedia system; it was also so good at text editing and formatting that it was used to typeset quite a few books, and had good enough IR and data structuring facilities that it was pressed into service for databases.
This emulator was used to demo FRESS live at the ACM hypertext '89 conference, at WWW6, and at the 1999 "AndyFest" at Brown University.
FRESS made use not only of alphanumeric display terminals but also of a then cutting-edge IMLAC graphics minicomputer 16 bit PDP-8, attached to mainframe via communications line and used as an intelligent terminal, which let the system incorporate windows and vector graphics.
FRESS was the first hypertext system to see systematic use in for-credit courses, including a poetry course in the mid-70s sponsored by a National Endowment for the Humanities.
FRESS was used for over two decades at Brown for personal hypertext libraries and courses and had several commercial spinoffs.
It wasn’t right, Fress was her dearest friend, and one she’d gladly give her life for if it were necessary.
I just feel helpless, Fress is out there..” she gestured with on arm “ and she might need help and I’m pacing a hole in the floor.” Lance chuckled as he pushed off the doorframe and approached her.
Fress Colias had decided not to struggle any longer, it was getting her nowhere.
The FRESS system was one of the very early such systems ever created, being preceded only by HES, also done at Brown, and Engelbart's NLS system.
Among the early projects done in FRESS was the teaching of a poetry course — at that time, the idea of teaching English Poetry with the assistance of computer software was very radical.
I have the entire database of that course, and a number of other early FRESS resources, converted to SGML from the binary IBM mainframe format that FRESS used.
FRESS was of course multiterminal, it supported outline processing, arbitrary-length strings, edits, etc.; it had no size limitations.
In FRESS, to a first approximation, you could not tell the difference between working with a two-page printed file and a 200-page printed file because of the software paging scheme we used.
The next thing we did after FRESS was put to bed in the late 1970s was to make a rather different hypertext system, our third by that time.
LIS 385T.6 Midterm -- Question #5(Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-22)
In 1968, van Dam moved on from the HES to FRESS (File Retrieval and Editing System), in which he hoped to combine the best aspect of HES and the best aspects of Doug Engelbart's recently demonstrated NLS.
FRESS was notable for its system-independence, its software paging scheme (which made working with large files as quick and easy as working with small ones), bidirectional links, and an undo feature.
The user interface for the system was itself graphical, and included a hypertext component in which users could construct pages, chapters, and links while viewing their entire system graphically.
Brown University's FRESS was the first hypertext system to run on commercial hardware and OS.
It actually handled complex documents better than non-hypertext systems, and so was used as a publishing system as well as a collaborative hypertext environment for teaching, research, and development.
FRESS had considerable support for document structuring and markup, affording separation of structure from formatting and hypertext semantics.
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Later on HES was used by NASA for documentation on the Apollo space program.
It could insert a marker at any location within a text document and link this selection to another point in the same, or different document.Two types of links were possible with FRESS: tags and jumps.
Tags were one-way links to information and jumps were two-way links, it could take you through separate but related documents, this was very similar to the World Wide Web of today.
FRESS welcomes all French-speaking students studying at UTS and all UTS students studying French, and anyone else interested, to share in a combination of French and Australian culture.
We intend to hold a commencement party at the beginning of Autumn Semester, so as to welcome new members, and to give everyone an opportunity to meet and mingle.
Once you have become a member of FRESS, we will be sending you regular emails containing information and details about FRESS's social activities.
For me the most interesting demo might have been the least advanced of them all: David Durand showing the FRESS system (File Retrieval and Editing System) developed at Brown University in 1971 as a successor to the original Hypertext Editing System (the world's first hypertext system).
The Mac was connected by a modem to the IBM 370 mainframe at Brown University which was still able to run the original old code, thus showing the advantage of having IBM maintain the same architecture all these years.
There was some talk about getting the actual hypertext documents off the system before FRESS finally died.
