Summary
Obsolete pre-Web hypertext browser for the Jargon File.
Back when I was first working on the Jargon File, I distributed it for a while in a flat-text form in which all the references to entries were surrounded by curly brtaces, a la "{foo}". A guy named Ray Gardner thought "Hey, why don't I..." and write what we'd now call a browser for the File - it was screen-oriented, could page up and down, and could chase links. The right and left arrow keys hopped from link to link on the page; press enter on a link and go to the entry. The idea for the browser was Ray's, but some of the interface polish was mine.
What makes this interesting is that we weren't imitating the text-mode lynx browser and the World Wide Web - we were anticipating it. Shortly after vh's first release in 1991 I got email from a then-obscure programmer named Tim Berners-Lee hinting that he was doing some hypertext-related stuff and asking if I might be interested in collaborating on some standards. I replied "yes", but never heard back from him.
Of course Tim Berners-Lee didn't stay obscure for very long after 1991. I've wondered ever since if Ray Gardner and I actually influenced the design of HTML. If I ever meet Sir Tim, I'll ask him.
Resources
| COPYING | project license |
| NEWS.adoc | project news |
| READ.ME | roadmap file |
| vh-1.11.tar.gz | gzipped source tarball |
| NEWS.html | project news |
The project repository is at https://gitlab.com/esr/vh.
If you appreciate this code (and especially if you make money by using it) please support me on Patreon.
Recent Changes
Final archival release - this code is obsolete
Supporters
This work is funded by...
My Bronze supporters: Martin Hohenberg, Jae Yang, Daniel Garber, Kyle Burkholder, Mike Nichols, Mark Ping, Tom Taylor, Arnold F. Williams, George Brower, Michael Nygard, Brendan Long, Sven Dowideit, Dave Witten, Jonathan Cast, James Cronin, David L. Jessup, Christopher Chang, Killer Delicious, Jacob Lyles, Neil Anuskiewicz, Mordant, Clemens Ladisch, Wojciech Woytniak, Masa Bando, John Carmack, Xingyu Wang, Jane Tang, Steven Evans, Jan Roudaut, Hsueh Sung, Ken LaCrosse, taishi28012, John Simpson, Jerod Tufte, Paul Abbott, Stan Witherspoon, Donald Greer, Gratiela Chergu, Michael Ciagala, Dale Carstensen, Chip Davis, Liudmilla Karukina, Jim McCloskey, Dewey Sasser, Hal Hildebrand, Connor Wood, Ken Kennedy, darrin, Mark Gardner, William Christensen, Malcolm Ocean, Rod Davenport, Nodarius Darjania, Cheryl Evry, Wenfeng Liang, Irving Rivas, Bill Soistman, ReallyBored, Άρης Δάσος, Ron Lauzon, TheFred, Paul Theodoropolous, Doug Phillips, Les Vogel, Matt Pollard, Andres Cordova, Umgeher Torgersen, Syeed Ali, Raghu Veer Dendukuri, Perry The Cynic, Gustav A Wirth, Mitchell Bryant, Matt Krueger, Jim Mog, John D. Taylor.
My Institutional supporters: Jason Azze and the DEVOPS team at his $DAYJOB, Christoph Happle, Symmetry Investments, Willam Duff, Mark Atwood, Caleb LaVergne, zariah mccall.
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