Guidon was our name for the client OCLC wrote for displaying electronic journals. Last night I had someone in Japan ask me permission to load this old screen shot of an experimental version of Guidon into Wikimedia for use in a Japanese article about electronic publishing. I'm not sure how they found it; I haven't seen that image for years. Looking around, I found an article in the 1995 Annual Review of OCLC Research, so the screen is probably from 1995 or so. The date on the .gif file is July 1996.
This was towards the end of OCLC's experimentation with SGML encoded documents and in production we were still distributing a C++ version of the Guidon client. The screen shot is of a port of Guidon running in Netscape, all done in Java applets. It had a lot of nice features, including zoom (using our own (patented!) way of loading TeX/Metafont fonts) and a two-column scroll that really worked (to everyone's surprise that saw it).
Unfortunately for the project, OCLC abandoned doing our own formatting of electronic journals soon after this, so it never got close to production. Page layout is expensive (several dollars/page) even when fairly well automated, which makes using the PDF files that publishers are already producing impossible to compete with. But the articles we were putting up under Guidon in the mid '90s were easier to read than PDFs are now, so there are still improvements ahead for electronic media.
--Th
Note: Yes, I gave permision for use of the image. If anyone notices it appearing in the Japanese Wikipedia let me know and I'll link to it.