Describe Telesophy's data model from the user's perspective.
The Telesophy user sees data as a set of packages, which each package (called an Information Unit, or IU) containing one or more objects. These objects can be text, graphics, sound, video, or an executable program. Each IU has a "label," which users can look at to determine whether or not to download the entire package. IU's can also contain links (called "connections") to other IU's in the system; these other IU's can be called up with a mouse click.
Each IU is shown in a window on the user's workstation display. As many IU's can be displayed at one time as the workstation will allow. Under certain conditions, the user is allowed to add new IU's to remote servers on the system.
Describe Telesophy's system architecture.
The Telesophy system architecture is designed to support distributed computing. It has three components: the user interface, indexing servers, and information unit (IU) servers. The user interface resides on the user's workstation, and is how the user accesses the system's information. Through the interface, the user sends queries for information to the indexing servers, which hold the unique identifiers and classification information for the available IUs. After receiving a list of the IUs which match his query, the user can send a request to the IU server to receive the actual IU.
The Telesophy system is designed (in theory) to be infinitely expandable -- the only limit on the size of the system is the amount of disk space to store information, and the amount of CPU time and bandwidth available to process requests. As many separate servers and fiber-optic lines can be attached to the system as are needed.
Why is Telesophy an important system in the hypertext literature?
The Telesophy system was the first to propose an open, distributed system of hypertext; one that would be (theoretically) infinitely expandable. It was the first to bring the insights of object-oriented programming into a functioning hypertext system. And it was the first to base its operations on a protocol (of queries and responses) rather than on a common platform, allowing a variety of diverse systems to be linked together.
I don't know whether the World Wide Web is based on Telesophy in any way, but some of the key ideas that have made the WWW such a massive success were first proposed in Telesophy.
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