1945,

vannevar bush (1890-1974), the grandfather of hypertext.

• wrote as we may think, imagining “a future device …  in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory.”
  • foresaw the explosion of information– or rather, the accessibility of information.
• conceptualized the memex, a personalized information retrieval system to index and navigate vast amounts of data.
• talked about interacting directly with the human brain. saw the potential of the encephalograph to bypass typing and talking, something we’re starting to see glimpses of these days.

1965,

twenty years later, ted nelson coins the term hypertext.

• he began working on xanadu, and hasn’t stopped since. maybe one day we will see the true vision that nelson has held in his mind for so long.

1967,

FRESS is created at brown university by andries (andy) van dam. intended to be device independent, avoiding size limitations. the first system to have the undo button. wrote so well it was able to be run in 1989 at the hypertext conference.

1987,

the ACM hypertext conference. fun to search it up and see the excitement and determination around new forms of information dissemination.

now,

i’ve used hyperlinks numerous times already. the experiment started at CERN now spans the globe, with billions of users and more than a trillion connections.