this stuff was huge for a while, 20-25 years ago, digital libraries, information exploration, ... consider even things like minority report, or more prosaically, all the demos coming out of MIT medialab.

It never really caught on, completed got clobbered by free text search, now AI chat interfaces I guess.

Am glad to see it bubble up again, because have good memories working on this stuff.

> this stuff was huge for a while, 20-25 years ago

If I recall correctly, it became popular because of the Lawnmower Man movie in '92.

I am too lazy to do the work but in that time frame I considered that a zooming/hierarchical view would be a nice way to browse the web, with followed links appearing as new pages next to the current page. The web became too dynamic for that anyway.