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Lab 2.2: Intermedia

Released: September 23rd 4:00pm ET
Due

Introduction

In this lab you will travel back in time to 1989 and act as if you were students in an English or Biology or Geology course using Intermedia. You will first go through the same hands-on Tutorials that they used to learn about Intermedia.

Objectives: The goal of this lab is to get you thinking about how the Intermedia approach and the WWW approach differ, what interesting or valuable features Intermedia had that didn’t make into the Web, and why Tim Berners-Lee (TBL) chose not to include these features. The idea is to think about tradeoffs – why are software design and architecture decisions made? Are certain designs not chosen because the feature doesn’t solve a common user problem? Is it because the problem is too hard to solve intellectually? Is it because it is solvable, but the state-of-technology can not yet support hte solution (memory limitations, network performance, etc.)? Is it because it is too complicated a concept for the user? Is it actually a great idea but not implemented because TBL wanted to get something out quickly and then was constrained by that choice from going back and implementing that idea?

Another objective is to have some fun! How many of your friends get to say they are using a computer their parents may have used when they were in elementary school?

For this lab you will be split into two groups. Each group will spend 1 hour on Intermedia and 1 hour on Dash. To get checked off for this lab, fill out the form at the end.

Checklist

Norm will lead the session on Intermedia in Thursday’s lab and will be on Zoom to answer questions on Friday! If you are fascinated and want to use the machines more than just this lab, reach out to Norm and he will happily help get you access to a machine.

Using Intermedia

Unlike Dash, Intermedia doesn’t run in a web browser, since web browsers didn’t yet exist when Intermedia was implemented! I have searched for Macintosh IIci/Motorola 68030 microprocessor emulator, but there are none that are robust enough to run the version of Unix (A/UX), a precursor to Linux, that Intermedia needs. So instead, you will have 4 real Macintosh IIci machines to use.

Since there are limited machines, you may want to pair up and do the work together, switching back and forth.

Steps

  1. If not already logged in, use the userid “nkm”. There is no password. (It was just too complicated to provide a separate Unix userid and permissions in the normal way).
  2. Go to the command shell on the Mac and type the command “askInter” . It will ask 3 questions – just hit RETURN for each answer. Intermedia will launch.
  3. On each machine, there is a User folder with subfolders numbered 1-12. Choose anyone that isn’t already taken and rename it to user 8-char userid. Open that folder. Remember the machine number you are on if you plan on going back later. (Note – there is no guarantee that stuff you create will be saved, even if it looks like things are saved properly. It should work just fine, but just a caveat.)
  4. Open the Intermedia documentation . The Tutorials are at the beginning.
  5. Read Section 1 - Introductory Tutorial.
  6. Follow the steps in Section 2 - Advanced Tutorial.
  7. Explore. In the New… menu, you will find a Text Editor, a Graphics Editor, a Timeline Editor (InterVal), and an Animation Editor (InterPlay). Templates and Mail are alpha versions, so stay away from them.
  8. In the leftmost menu, you will find a Search… option. Try it out and see what happens (there is a corpus on Mark Twain in the system, so you can try searches on that). Check out the graph that shows the relevancy of each hit. Turn on and off the morphology settings that determine whether the search will include various variants of the search word you used (plurals, different tenses, etc.)
  9. Just have fun.

At anytime, if you are confused about anything you can check Intermedia’s documentation which begins after the Tutorial section. If not, feel free to ask Norm or a TA about anything at all!