Brief History

Microcosm is a pre-eminent hypertext system - pre-Web.

It is believed that work started in 1988, by the Department of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton ,and ran to the mid-1990's. The work was eventurally spun out into a company (Microcosm Ltd) at the University of Southampton Enterprice Park at Chilworth.

During the Web and Internet Science (WAIS) Laboratory summer research festivals of 2017 and 2018 Mark Anderson developed the Virtual Machine (VM) integral to this dataset and to getting it to work again.  This was done using a Microcosm CD provided by Hugh Davis and Mark Weal. It is understood that the version dates to around 1992.

The story of microcosm is documented in the book "Rethinking Hypermedia: The Microcosm Approach".  It is essentially the story of the Microcosm hypermedia research and development project that started in the late 1980's and from which has emerged a philosophy that re-examines the whole concept of hypermedia and its role in the evolution of multimedia information systems. The book presents the complete story of Microcosm to date. It sets the development of Microcosm in the context of the history of the subject from which it evolved, as well as the developments in the wider world of technology over the last two decades including personal computing, high-speed communications, and the growth of the Internet. These all lead us towards a world of global integrated information environments: the publishing revolution of the 20th century, in principle making vast amounts of information available to anybody anywhere in the world. 
Rethinking Hypermedia: The Microcosm Approach explains the role that open hypermedia systems and link services will play in the integrated information environments of the future. It considers issues such as authoring, legacy systems and data integrity issues, and looks beyond the simple hypertext model provided in the World Wide Web and other systems today to the world of intelligent information processing agents that will help us deal with the problems of information overload and maintenance. 
Rethinking Hypermedia: The Microcosm Approach will be of interest to all those who are involved in designing, implementing and maintaining hypermedia systems such as the World Wide Web by setting the groundwork for producing a system that is both easy to use and easy to maintain. Rethinking Hypermedia: The Microcosm Approach is essential reading for anyone involved in the provision of online information.

There is a YouTube video 'Microcosm: an open hypermedia system' 1992 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DF9oAwUgmKo

History collated December, 2018