I gather that TimBL believed that hypertext _is_ an single consistent
user interface to different network services:
--- From: WorldWideWeb: Proposal for a HyperText Project at: http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/Proposal.htmlWorldWideWeb:
Proposal for a HyperText Project T. Berners-Lee / CN, R. Cailliau / ECP
Abstract:
HyperText is a way to link and access information of various kinds as a web of nodes in which the user can browse at will. Potentially, HyperText provides a single user-interface to many large classes of stored information such as reports, notes, data-bases, computer documentation and on-line systems help. We propose the implementation of a simple scheme to incorporate several different servers of machine-stored information already available at CERN, including an analysis of the requirements for information access needs by experiments.
---see also: "WWW Project History" at http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/History.html
The WWW project is _very_ well documented on info.cern.ch. It's fairly ironic that most WWW users get their info from NCSA's whats-new and FAQ documents, and never get the background info from info.cern.ch. They end up asking historical and architectural questions on www-talk or comp.infosystems.... that would be easily answered with 5 minutes surfing around info.cern.ch.
Oh... and do dispell a popular myth: the CERN LineMode browser is _not_ the original WWW client. The original WWW client was a WYWIWYG HTML editor and multi-window browser that TimBL wrote for the NeXTStep environment. I thought it was kinda funny when somebody asked on comp.infosystems.www.* "Is there a WWW client for the NeXT?"
Dan