Hyperland

Hyperland is a 50-minute long documentary movie about hypertext and surrounding technologies. It was written by Douglas Adams and produced and directed by Max Whitby.[1] It ran on BBC Two in 1990. It stars Douglas Adams as a computer user and Tom Baker as a personification of a software agent.

In the show Adams has a dream where he is browsing through various media. While Adams is browsing, many people and projects related to the general theme of hypertext and multimedia are presented:

• Vannevar Bush and his Memex[2] concept
• Ted Nelson explains hypertext and Project Xanadu.
• Hans Peter Brøndmo talks about the idea of animated icons.
• Robert Winter talks about an interactive version of Beethoven's 9th Symphony.
• An idea from Kurt Vonnegut's book Palm Sunday is presented: stories and narrative structures have shapes that can be represented mathematically as graphs.
• Robert Abel shows his multimedia version of Picasso's Guernica.[3]
• Apple Multimedia Lab employees Steve Gano, Kristee Kreitman, Kristina Hooper, Michael Naimark and Fabrice Florin talk about a multimedia version of Life Story, a BBC TV movie dramatisation of the 1953 discovery of the structure of DNA.
• Amanda Goodenough presents Inigo Gets Out, an interactive story for children using Hypercard.
• Brad deGraf and Michael Wahrman talk about their digital puppet Mike Normal.
• A NASA Ames Research Center scientist presents a prototype Virtual Reality helmet called Cyberiad.
• Marc Canter makes a cameo (non-)appearance as an animated icon that is not "clicked" by Adams; the audience never gets to see his interview.

The dream (and the documentary) ends with a vision of how information might be accessed in 2005. Hyperland does describe a number of features of the modern web. This is especially noteworthy because it predates the public release of the first Web browser by about a year.