A Brief History of Hypertext
1941 — Borges
Jorge Luis Borges publishes “The Garden of Forking Paths.” Borges’ short story is considered the earliest precursor to hypertext.
1945 — Memex
In an Atlantic article, Vannevar Bush proposes a device that he calls the Memex, which would store content on microfilm. Each frame of microfilm would be tagged, and the Memex could use those tags to index and cross-reference all of the content.
1963 — Xanadu
Ted Nelson coins the term “hypertext” as part of his proposed Project Xanadu, an ambitious project that would allow readers to form “zippered lists” that form compound documents from various pieces of other documents. Unlike today’s hyperlink, Xanadu’s links were bi-directional.
1968 — The Mother of All Demos
Douglas Engelbart introduces a hypertext editing interface to the public. Engelbart’s system included nearly all the features we now associate with computers, including graphics, video conferencing, the mouse, version control, windows, and hypertext. The demonstration was retroactively named, “The Mother of All Demos.”
1977 — The Aspen Movie Map
DARPA and MIT collaborate to produce the Aspen Movie Map, a fully interactive video that allowed viewers to take a self-guided tour through Aspen, Colorado.
1980 — ENQUIRE
Tim Berners-Lee creates the first wiki, which he calls ENQUIRE. The database system used a series of cards which each contained bi-directional hyperlinks to other cards.
1987 — HyperCard
Apple releases HyperCard for the Macintosh. It is the first widely-available application for producing hypermedia. The application utilized a database and a series of linked cards. Each card could hold various interactive elements, and cards could be linked to others in the same stack. Different stacks could also be linked to one another. Myst, one of the most successful computer games of all time, FIX was initially written in HyperCard. Unlike most other games of its time, Myst allowed users to explore a world in a user-directed order.
1989 — WorldWideWeb
Tim Berners-Lee creates a hypertext project “as a way to link and access information of various kinds as a web of nodes in which the user can browse at will.” Berners-Lee christens the project the WorldWideWeb.
1992 — Lynx
A new application — a web browser — called Lynx allows users to access hypertext links inside documents. It can reach into documents across the entire Internet.
1994 — The Web’s Big Break Out
In 1993, there were just 500 web servers on the entire Internet. By 1994, the number jumped to 10,000. HTML and the hyperlink soon eclipsed all other hypertext systems.
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