Digital Highways 1993

What follows is a PDF of a talk presented at Seybold Seminars, a newspaper technical conference, in 1993: DigitalHighways1993

The goal was to help publishers come to terms with the types of changes that were going to be necessary to integrate newspapers into current and upcoming technological advancements.

Remember, Tim Berners Lee only officially announced the World Wide Web in 1993. In practice, I had come familiar with the concept of DARPA hyperlinks back in 1972 working with a Computer Graphics group at the University of Nijmegen, NL under Andy Van Dam, creator of the hyperlinked editing tool, FRESS.

In late 1993 and 1994 we used Dave Winer’s Frontier Scripting System to produce the Rome (NY) Sentinel’s first website. Winer had essentially defined RSS. Frontier was brilliant.

It took about a year, and the assistance of a San Diego fish brain expert, to refine the Frontier tools that would allow us to insert fresh copy daily into blog entry envelopes, thus avoiding the cost of a high tech composing room whose job would have been to translate what the editor had decided to run into what the website could show. Article files dropped into a hot folder converted the stories to HTML for the webserver.