Daniel Kies Department of English College of DuPage
Composition and Modern English Grammar		Contact Form

A Brief History of the "HyperTextBooks"

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These web sites began in my filing cabinet.

In the early 1980s, I began to use (and think of) computers as my primary writing tool. I was convinced that computers helped me, since I am a poor typist. The computer was a blessing, saving me time and paper, given that I had so many misspellings, typos, awkward sentences, and paragraphs that needed to be added or fixed in revision. I wanted to share those advantages with my students. By the mid-1980s, I was using WordPerfect for DOS (like almost everyone else with a PC), and learning to use the Reveal Codes feature to create and perfect my diagrams in the word processing documents, recreating the hand-drawn diagrams in my class handouts. The Reveal Codes feature allowed me to learn the document's SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language). By the late 1980s, I started reading about attempts to realize Vannevar Bush's idea of hypertext, using a variation of SGML.

Unlike some who argue that hypertext may destroy literacy, I am inclined to see hypertext as an evolutionary, rather than revolutionary, move toward literacy.

January 1982

I was a part of a small group of teaching assistants and instructors who established the first computer aided composition classroom at the University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee. We assembled 26 PC kits with green phosphorous monitors in a classroom on the first floor of Curtin Hall. That early computer lab did not have networking capabilities, so I would go from machine to machine in the lab to load the work into the computers from 5.25 inch "floppy disks," and then I would go back machine-by-machine when the students had finish their work to save their work to another floppy disk. (Years later, a network technician told me that networking technicians had a name for what we were doing in the pre-networked computing environment of the 1980s — "sneakernets.")

September 1983-1986

I started retyping class handouts, exercises, and notes from paper copies (made with spirit duplicators and mimeographs) into word processing files. I distributed them via my File Transfer Protocol (FTP) server. I began to use email with students outside of class or office hours. (I was moving between jobs and universities in these years, and it was just easier to use my own networks from home.)

I moved to College of DuPage in September 1986.

September 1991

Set up a gopher server for distributing the class handouts, exercises, and tests to augment the FTP server.

November-December 1992

I was inspired by the first web site in internet history (which is still online). That first site went live November 27, 1992.

Tim Berners-Lee and the documentation specialists at CERN created the HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) as part of their work at the CERN labs (the largest particle physics laboratory in the world).

I spent much of Thanksgiving and Christmas breaks marking up class handouts in HyperText Markup Language (HTML, a subset of SGML) and adapting the gopher server to respond to HTTP requests.

January 1993

Modern English Grammar went publicly available on the World Wide Web, the first part of the HyperTextBooks.

September 1995

Early on, some college administrations started talking about faculty-written teaching materials belonging to the college (as work-for-hire). I first copyrighted some web pages in 1993 and first copyrighted the web sites for my individual classes in 1995.

However, I kept these pages publicly available, and I welcomed colleagues to use (and modify) these materials freely, if they found anything useful.

January 2000

I published the composition courses with Harcourt Brace.

February 2000

As ownership issues regarding web publications on college/university servers grew more heated, and as tensions between administration and faculty over the use and governance of the college's web servers became increasingly contentious, I established the papyr.com domain, the current home of the HyperTextBooks.

Today, I remain fascinated by the link between the medium of instruction (writing, via network computing [and hypertext]) and the object of instruction (increasing one's facility with language and writing).

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