Norton Guides

Norton Guides appears to be one of the first Online help systems and the first example of a commercial product where programming reference information was integrated into the software development environment.

The format was later used by independent users to create simple hypertexts before this concept was more popular.

The concept of providing "information at your fingertips", as he called it, via a TSR program was a signature technology developed by Woodford in 1980 and used in other programs he created in that era including MathStar, WordFinder/SynonymFinder and a TEMPEST WWMCCS workstation developed for Systematics General Corporation.

Norton Guides were compiled from ASCII source files with a tool called NGC.

Morten Elling wrote an alternative guides compiler NGX in 1994 or earlier.