Panasonic Owl

Office Workstations Ltd. (OWL) is a research and development laboratory for Panasonic, one of the trading names for Matsushita Electric Industrial Co. of Japan; hence our unofficial name: 'Panasonic OWL'.

We developed "Guide", the world's first hypertext authoring system (predating the Web).

Feel free to provide a reference backing up the claim that Guide was the "first hypertext authoring system". Just because it came before the Web doesn't mean that it's the first.

• It wasn't the first, but I remember when it came out, and they were making that claim back then, too, and never backed down from it. Here's a history that includes Owl (but not as the first): http://ei.cs.vt.edu/~wwwbtb/book/chap1/htx_hist.html.

• Owl is credited in TimBernersLee's book, WeavingTheWeb. Tim approached them about modifying Guide to support the internet work he was thinking of, but it seems no-one there was interested.

Panasonic OWL operates as part of Matsushita's Overseas R&D organization, which also has laboratories in England, Germany, Singapore, Taipei, Beijing, and in the US in Santa Barbara, Cupertino, Boston, Princeton and Burlington, NJ. OWL has specific responsibilities for the development of software for use in multimedia products under the Panasonic name. Matsushita is one of the world's largest consumer electronics manufacturers and has taken a leading role in bringing Digital Audio/Video to the consumer market, in such products as DVD and Digital Television (DTV).

Panasonic OWL's role is research and development of the software components for today's and tomorrow's digital video consumer goods. We are developing products to support the creation and delivery of multimedia content through optical disks, broadcasting and public networks. We are also researching and defining future directions for technology in these areas. As part of the Matsushita group, we work with many other R&D organizations to bring together next-generation hardware, operating systems and applications software to meet the needs of publishers and broadcasters in today's rapidly changing marketplace.

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There be some mention of IanRitchie? here.

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OWL closed down on the 30th April 2005.

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CategoryCompany, sort of