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Comment by akgoel | Hacker News Reader

This basically sounds like WinHelp, which was a compiled format of RTF, prior to the availability of HTML.

It was in fact exactly that. The WinHelp team got folded into our group, and then WinHelp became something of an orphaned project for a while (or maybe forever?).

Not to stray too far from the subject, and you clearly have some valuable ability to improvise in tough engineering requirements. Where did you end up?

Hopefully his username is not an indication.

Haha, I was thinking the same thing, but hopefully he is retired after 30 years in tech (with a nice retirement portfolio assuming he worked at MSFT in the early 90s).

i certainly found myself thinking a similar thought, if only because said username seems highly applicable to my own life. mostly the jobless part as i have done a lot of work to leave the junkie aspect behind but i would be lying if I said vestiges of it don't still remain

Off topic: Thank you for getting me to research the history of the hyperlink [1].

- 1945 linked microfilm pages in the essay "As We May Think" by Vannevar Bush [2]

- 1964 the term "hyperlink" in Project Xanadu by Ted Nelson

- 1983 the "highlighted link" in HyperTIES system by Dan Ostroffin [3]

- 1989 manifesto for the Web by Tim Berners-Lee

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperlink#History

[2]: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-m...

[3]: http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/hyperties/

If you like that you might love this trip back in time from the one and only Douglas Adams;

"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."

https://archive.org/details/DouglasAdams-Hyperland

I can remember teaching myself HTML using a WinHelp file I found on a magazine coverdisk.

Exactly what I was thinking.

That was a pain - I think I ended up writing RTF by hand.

Authoring WinHelp files is a pain (and indeed better done by hand or via a convertor from a saner format), but from a user perspective WinHelp is IMO the best format - the only thing i'd like (assuming WinHelp was still distributed with Windows 10 - though you can copy it from a machine that has it and it'll work) is the contents sidebar from HTMLHelp (which is also nice, but a full blown browser engine is IMO overkill and it gets often abused with fancy CSS and javascript effects in some CHM files - WinHelp is too limited for that, though some programs did try to push things further than should be pushed).

Call me a very ancient oldie, but the - in my opinion - best help system ever was the one from VAX/VMS.

It was rather simple, but thanks to its hyrarchical structure extremely accessible, even when you just started using the operating system.

DEC's extraordinarilly well structured documentation added to the whole experience.

Compared to that most technical documentation today is outright atrocious.

I was on a mailing list for a 'fanzine' in the 90's that was actually mailed around as a WinHelp file. It was actually really nice.

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