Symbolics Document Examiner: Meaning (information, definition, explanation, facts)

The Symbolics Document Examiner was a powerful hypertext system developed at Symbolics (a manufacturer of high-end workstations) by Janet Walker in 1985. The Symbolics Document Examiner was first used for a hypertext implementation of, interestingly enough, the Symbolics manual.

The Symbolics manual was an 8,000 page document that was represented in a 10,000 node "hyperdocument" containing 23,000 links in all. The entire manual required 10 MB of storage space, which was a fair amount in 1985. The Symbolics Document Examiner used a hierarchical structure, which differed from other experimental hypertext systems.

Symbolics Document Examiner users could add bookmarks, which allowed returning to specific items easier; this method was later incorporated in graphical web browsers. The system also supported on-line substring searching. The biggest drawback to the Symbolics Document Examiner was that users could not make changes to any information or to a document's navigation.