“Document Examiner: Delivery Interface for Hypertext Documents”, 1987-11 (; backlinks):
This paper describes the user interface strategy of Symbolics Document Examiner [~8,000 pages / 10,000 nodes / 23,000 hyperlinks for Genera; supports transclusion], a delivery interface for commercial hypertext documents.
Unlike many hypertext interfaces, Document Examiner does not adopt the directed graph as its fundamental user-visible navigation model. Instead it offers context evaluation and content-based searching capabilities that are based on consideration of the strategies that people use in interacting with paper documents.
…New employees of Symbolics are introduced to Document Examiner as part of their early experience with the machine. We have software engineers who know little about the organization of the paper manuals as they do most of their reading using the online form of the manual. In fact, a recent survey of the engineering staff found about half of the 24 people who answered either did not have a paper document set or had not removed the shrink wrap from their books (five months after receiving them).
…The major complaints concerning Document Examiner, from both customers and inhouse users concern performance. Many commands, including overviews, large tables of contents, long lists retrieved by index searching, and remote lookup of long topics, take more than 10 seconds to complete. This amount of delay is unacceptable to everybody, including the implementors. The fact that people do continue to use this facility heavily in spite of the delays is probably a testimony to the usefulness of the online features over paper.