Douglas Adams - Hyperland (BBC2 1990)
Quietly tucked away in the BBC2 schedules of autumn 1990 was this ahead-of-its-time gem, written by Douglas Adams - technnology lover, Python writer, occasional Pink Floyd guitarist and creator of the iconic Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy series of books and radio/TV programmes.
Circumventing the limitations of 'linear' broadcast TV, the 50-minute programme imagines a new world in which an AI software 'agent' - brought to life here by Doctor Who favourite Tom Baker - helps the user (played by Adams) to find and access material of interest in a global world of hyperlinked information - text, images, audio and video. Pop-up 'micons' (moving icons) conveniently link to interviews with leading technologists of the era (among them Ted Nelson, Robert Winter, Robert Abel, Kristina Hooper, Fabrice Forin and Steve Gano).
Some of this stuff has dated badly - few visions of the future get everything right! - but the programme is nevertheless of considerable historical importance.
Incredibly, at about the time Hyperland was being broadcast, a young CERN computer scientist by the name of Tim Berners-Lee was beavering away on URLs and HTTP, the foundations of what would become the World Wide Web.
Even Adams, who foresaw so much, didn't anticipate the impact the Web - and the Internet that conveys its data globally - would have on civilisation. Needless to say, the enticing infoworld envisaged in Hyperland was a public-service one of education, art, literature (including nods to Adams' own works!) and entertainment. There's no advertising, hacking, cybercrime, information theft, social-media addicts, unaccountable corporate domination or drug-like dependence on the smartphones that Adams himself predicted.
And Tom Baker's enthusiastic agent isn't forever popping up to try and sell you something...
Adams was a keen user of Macintosh products (the 'Hypercard' hypermedia environment, itself influenced by Steve Jobs' legendary visits to Xerox PARC, must have been an inspiration) and so it shouldn't shock you to learn that Apple contributed to the programme. Other institutions helping out included the NASA Ames research centre (notably on a segment describing the then-groundbreaking technology of VR) and MIT's Media Lab.
The other versions of this ground-breaking programme I could find online are of rather poor audio-visual quality and seem to be derived from the same source. Admittedly I taped this one myself as an impecunious recent graduate, using a budget JVC VCR that had been dumped because a cat had used it as a lavatory (you can imagine the fun I had fixing THAT!) but RealityRegen has cleaned it up a treat!
Original broadcast: BBC2, September 21 1990 (2130)
User: Douglas Adams
Agent: Tom Baker
Written by: Douglas Adams
Produced by: Max Whitby
Also available (for streaming) at: https://youtu.be/5nOXGYxHVFI . NOTE: The YouTube version is incomplete, owing to the removal of elements flagged up by YouTube as "Horizon SP E10: Life Story". However, the IA version available here is complete.
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