[1] Ian Ritchie, founder of OWL, presented a TED talk in 2011 describing his missed opportunity to convert Guide to a graphical browser for the Web at its inception in 1990, titled "The day I turned down Tim Berners-Lee".
(In 1987, Apple had begun giving away its own graphical programming system, HyperCard, which had some hypertext features.)
According to news reports in 1988,[3] OWL announced plans to release a version of Guide for the IBM PS/2 line of computers under the name "Hyper Document", to compete with HyperCard on the Apple Macintosh.
OWL gradually shifted the focus of Guide from a low-cost hypertext word processor to a more expensive CD-ROM multimedia development system.
Guide supported pop-ups for small annotations, and jumps, which behaved like the follow-link operation in most hypertexts (as in van Dam's FRESS system).