Hyperland; 1990 Douglas Adams Documentary on the Intarwebs

Hyperland; 1990 Douglas Adams Documentary on the Intarwebs

This is pretty cool, Hyperland, a BBC show from 1990, predicts that "linear television" is going to be done away with. Especially interesting from a historical perspective, as this was produced and aired way before (four or five years being like a geological epoch in computer time) the mid-90's Internet craze began. Indeed the word "internet" is never used in the production. I mean come on they titled the the thing Hyperland, which I bet was Douglas Adams's term, as he wrote the program. Mr. Adams personal software agent, Tom, is played by Tom Baker, the quintessential Dr. Who.
This interesting little film sent me on a Wikipedia orgy, as you might be able to tell from all the links above. Fitting I suppose.

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... -From the Douglas Adams website page on Hyperland.