Hyperland

In this one-hour documentary produced by the {BBC} in 1990, Douglas falls asleep in front of a television and dreams about future time when he may be allowed to play a more active role in the information he chooses to digest. A software agent, Tom (played by Tom Baker), guides Douglas around a multimedia information landscape, examining (then) cuttting-edge research by the {SF} Multimedia Lab and {NASA} Ames research center, and encountering hypermedia visionaries such as Vannevar Bush and Ted Nelson. Looking back now, it's interesting to see how much he got right and how much he didn't: these days, no one's heard of the {SF} Multimedia Lab, and his super-high-tech portrayal of {VR} in 2005 could be outdone by a modern {PC} with a 3D card. However, these are just minor niggles when you consider how much more popular the technologies in question have become than anyone could have predicted - for while Douglas was creating Hyperland, a student at {CERN} in Switzerland was working on a little hypertext project he called the World Wide Web... http://www.douglasadams.com/creations/hype.html