What does the University of Minnesota Twin Cities have to do with this discussion? And why do you care which apps a university research lab shipped? ;)

If you want to know about what contributions Ben Shneiderman and his University of Maryland Human Computer Interaction Lab have made, you can read my other post:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38920423

Or wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Shneiderman

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Maryland_Human%E...

Or Ben Shneiderman's home page:

https://www.cs.umd.edu/users/ben/

One app that the UMD Human Computer Interaction Lab shipped in several versions was HyperTIES, which was used to implement “Hypertext on Hypertext” that ACM distributed with the articles from the July 1987 Hypertext conference, which
influenced Tim Berners-Lee to make hypertext links blue:

The Interactive Encyclopedia System:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Interactive_Encyclopedia_S...

HyperTIES Discussions from Hacker News:

https://donhopkins.medium.com/hyperties-discussions-from-hac...

>Don Hopkins sent the following message at 10:07 AM, AUG 28, 2021

>Why are hyperlinks blue?

>Hello Elise. Here is some information about why hyperlinks are blue, from Ben Shneiderman’s answer to a question I asked him about the origin of the term “hyperlink”. I think your belief that HyperTIES was not the first instance of blue hyperlinks because it used cyan links is splitting hairs, and a “No Blue Scotsman” argument, especially since Tim Berners-Lee told Ben Sheniderman at the time that he was influenced by Ben’s design as he saw it in the HyperTIES-based “Hypertext on Hypertext” that ACM distributed with the articles from the July 1987 Hypertext conference at the University of North Carolina. Ben describes the color as “light blue”, which he chose from the limited palette available on PCs at the time, based on controlled experiments he and his students performed comparing user comprehension and recollection.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28317104

HI Don (and Jack Gilmore),

Thanks for including me in this conversation.

I do not have a claim for the term “hyperlinks” and don’t know when it came into use. My claim is for the visual interface for showing highlighted selectable links embedded in paragraphs. This is what we called embedded menu items in that I think is an influential paper on the topic, which was peer-reviewed and published in the CACM in April 1986.

https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/5684.5687

http://www.cs.umd.edu/~ben/papers/Koved1986Embedded.pdf

While Engelbart had shown a list that could be selected by pointing and clicking in 1968, I claim the idea of embedded highlighted selectable text in paragraphs. This was implemented by grad student Daniel Ostroff and described in:

Ewing J, Mehrabanzad S, Sheck S, Ostroff D and Shneiderman B (1986), "An experimental comparison of a mouse and arrow-jump keys for an interactive encyclopedia", International Journal of Man-Machine Studies, Jan., 1986, Vol 24, pp. 29-45.

[Abstract] [BibTeX] [DOI]

Ostroff D and Shneiderman B (1988), "Selection devices for users of an electronic encyclopedia: an empirical comparison of four possibilities", Information Processing and Management, Nov., 1988, Vol 24(6), pp. 665-680.

[Abstract] [BibTeX] [DOI]

I think the 1988 paper was the earlier study, but the publication took a while.

My students conducted more than a dozen experiments (unpublished) on different ways of highlighting and selection using current screens, e.g. green screens only permitted, bold, underscore, blinking, and I think italic(???). When we had a color screen we tried different color highlighted links. While red made the links easier to spot, user comprehension and recollection of the content declined. We chose the light blue, which Tim adopted.

His systems with embedded menus (or hot spots), where a significant user interface improvement over early systems such as Gopher. But Tim told me at the time that he was influenced by our design as he saw it in the Hypertext on Hypertext project that we used Hyperties to build for the July 1988 CACM that held the articles from the July 1987 Hypertext conference at the University of North Carolina. The ACM sold 4000 copies of our Hypertext on Hypertext disks.

Our history is here:

https://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/hyperties/

and the video is very helpful in showing the design we used, which is what I think Tim built on for his WWW prototypes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29b4O2xxeqg

So in summary, I don’t know who coined hypertext, but I do think our work visual and interaction design was influential.

Our Hyperties system was picked up by Cognetics Corporation (around 1987) who made a modestly successful commercial run with it, doing dozens of corporate projects, most notably the Hewlett-Packard user manual for their Laserjet 4 was distributed as a Hyperties disk.

Hyperties was the name we shifted to after we got a stop and desist order from a lawyer because our TIES (The Interactive Encyclopedia System) conflicted with an existing product. By then “hyper” was a growing term.

Let me know if this helps, and what other questions you have…. Ben

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HCIL also shipped various treemapping applications:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treemapping

>Area-based visualizations have existed for decades. For example, mosaic plots (also known as Marimekko diagrams) use rectangular tilings to show joint distributions (i.e., most commonly they are essentially stacked column plots where the columns are of different widths). The main distinguishing feature of a treemap, however, is the recursive construction that allows it to be extended to hierarchical data with any number of levels. This idea was invented by professor Ben Shneiderman at the University of Maryland Human – Computer Interaction Lab in the early 1990s. [21][22] Shneiderman and his collaborators then deepened the idea by introducing a variety of interactive techniques for filtering and adjusting treemaps.

https://www.cs.umd.edu/~ben/papers/Johnson1991Tree.pdf

https://treemapart.wordpress.com/