Hyperland

Hyperland is a 1990 BBC documentary written by Douglas Adams and featuring Tom Baker (dressed at one point as a Neanderthal). What a find! The concepts explained in it will be old hat to modern viewers, but it’s fascinating to see a vision of something not quite like the Web in a programme made just before people knew about the Web (which existed in 1990, but only really for a relative handful of people around CERN; Tim Berners-Lee published the HTML spec in 1991). I was amused by its mention of “micons”—”motion icons”, a neologism coined by Hans Peter Brøndmo, a young computer scientist interviewed on the show: a neologism so thoroughly forgotten that it doesn’t seem to get a mention anywhere on the Web apart from his Wikipedia page. (He now works for X—no relation—which should probably change its name to Not That X. When it comes to naming, the guy can’t catch a break.) Towards the end of the documentary there’s a glorious vision of the future of 2005, which captures the purest…

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