File Retrieval and Editing System

It is also possibly the first computer-based system to have had an "undo" feature for quickly correcting small editing or navigational mistakes.

FRESS allowed multiple users to collaborate on as set of documents, which could be of arbitrary size, and (unlike prior systems) were not laid out in lines until the moment of display.

But English Professor Robert Scholes and two teaching assistants worked with the FRESS team to run a small experiment funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities.

They saw hypertext as an attractive new way to present poetry, which is often highly reflexive and full of allusions and references to other works.

[8] For example, in the Preface to Person and Object Chisholm writes "The book would not have been completed without the epoch-making File Retrieval and Editing System..."[9] Through the diligent work of Alan Hecht, FRESS survived a major OS upgrade around 1978.

Although support had to be withdrawn a few years later for lack of resources and while rarely used, FRESS still runs on the current Brown mainframe.

[10] He and Steven DeRose, the last FRESS project director, recovered the old poetry class databases and gave live demos on this and a few later occasions.