This paper provides a brief description of Hyper-G, the first second-generation hypermedia system. The first section identifies problems with first generation hypermedia systems. The following sections discuss the new concepts that are implemented in Hyper-G, including user accounts and billing, structuring of data, caching and replication, native document types, navigation, and editing and authoring. These concepts, such as a world-wide distributed network database, a separated link database and bidirectional links allow for highly sophisticated navigation and hyperlinks in all native document types such as hypertext, images, Postscript documents and even in movies, sound, and 30 scenes. Hyper-G also implements powerful search mechanisms, such as Boolean searching of titles, keywords, and fulltext with user-defined scope from one collection on one server to all servers worldwide. The system is compatible to first generation systems like Gopher and World Wide Web. (Author/AEF)