IC Online Interview with Robert Cailliau I proposed a range of possible projects for myself, one of which was Hypertext, and another of which was analyzing physics data using object-oriented systems and NeXTStep.
But why were you so hot on Hypertext?
I felt that we needed to be able to do more than just produce something and then output it on paper; we needed to be able to navigate within it. There had been this project called CERNDOC, which was a system completely based on VM, CMS, and the IBM. It was sort of a hierarchical system in which you could search for documentation, get a document out, and then maybe print it. But I felt that the whole thing should have been hypertext-based, or that we should at least look into what could be done with it. I thought that we could maybe even do things on the network, but I had not thought of the Internet.