Company

The Liquid Information Company is a London based company, registration number 6673135, incorporated 14th of August 2008 under the name 'The Hyperwords Company', now 'The Liquid Information Company'.

The genesis for the Liquid Information interactive text (Hyperwords) approach can be traced back to when Frode Hegland wrote an article on www.liquid.org (wayback machine link to 1995) called ‘Automatic Hypertext’. The article starts with the question and challenge: “Should links always be industrial age heavy metal chains statically linking two 'spaces' together, or should they become even more powerful as a kind of quickly configurable search engine?” The idea was to produce queries quickly based on what you were reading, even if feedback would take a few seconds.

Frode Hegland also wrote about the power of the ctrl-click (Mac)/right-click (Windows) menu around that time, extolling its virtues. It seemed to be a powerful way to provide tools to the user.

The real birth of Liquid Information came with the realization of the power of a hierarchical approach he saw during the making of the Invisible Revolution Project, when Doug was demonstrating his Augment/NLS system. The system is command based - users type in commands to make actions happen. These commands follow a basic grammar and it’s relatively easy to learn a few commands and build on the vocabulary over time (this is what we now refer to as “keyboard phrases” in Liquid Information, where you can enter a string of quick and logical keyboard shortcuts for a command, such as “rw” for “open References, then show me Wikipedia”). Then Doug did something which a few months later caused Liquid Information (first called 'cynapse', then 'Hyperwords' now 'Liquid Information') to be born, he hit the '?' key and all the available options came up on the screen. It’s a quick and effective help system and the Liquid Information approach is simply to show all the possible commands all the time, as helper “wheels” and reminders of what’s available, but lets users skip past them quickly with the keyword phrases.

In other words Liquid Information is a small reflection of Augment’s Help system and to repeat a quote from an earlier chapter, from Doug’s 1962 paper:

“...This computerized system is used over and over and over again to help me do little things--where my methods and ways of handling little things are changed until, lo, they’ve added up and suddenly I can do impressive new things.”
Doug Engelbart Augmenting Human Intellect 1962