Microcosm (hypermedia system)

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Microcosm was a hypermedia system, originally developed in 1988 by the Department of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton, with a small team of researchers in the Computer Science group: Wendy Hall, Andrew Fountain, Hugh Davis and Ian Heath.{{cite web|url=http://www.nngroup.com/articles/architectural-component-hypertext-systems/|title=Architectural Component of Hypertext Systems|author=Jakob Nielsen|date=1 January 1995|accessdate=21 January 2013}}{{cite conference|url= http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/254308|title= MICROCOSM: an open model for hypermedia with dynamic linking|last1=Fountain|first1=Andrew|last2=Hall|first2=Wendy|author-link2=Wendy_Hall|last3=Heath|first3=Ian|last4=Davis|first4=Hugh|date=1990|publisher=Cambridge University Press|pages=298–311}} The system pre-dates the web and builds on early hypermedia systems, such as Ted Nelson's Project Xanadu and work of Douglas Engelbart. And like Intermedia or Hyper-G, which were other hypermedia systems created around the same time, Microcosm stores links between documents in a separate database.{{cite book |last1=Gillies |first1=James |last2=Cailliau |first2=Robert |author-link2=Robert_Cailliau |title=How the Web was Born |publisher=Oxford University Press |isbn=978-0-19-286207-5 |page=129}}