Hypertext history

The "H" in HTML stands for "hypertext." The reader of a hypertext document can jump around rather than reading sequentially from start to finish as with a typical book or article. The ideas of hypertext and of sharing hypertexts within a community was first speculated upon by Vannevar Bush, an MIT professor who was President Roosevelt's science advisor during the second World War. Bush published his idea in an article in The Atlantic Monthly.

That article was read by a young navy officer named Douglas Engelbart, who was inspired to build an experimental system for storing and retrieving hypertext documents. Engelbart and his team invented many things we take for granted like user interfaces with windows and the mouse. In 1968 he gave a very influential demonstration of his system.

Note that JCR Licklider, who envisioned and led in the funding of much of the research that led to both the personal computer and the Internet, was a young colleague of Bush at MIT.

When the Internet came along, programmers at the University of Minnesota developed Gopher, a client-server system for linking text documents. But, Gopher links were not inside documents like Web links -- they were on a table of contents page -- and you could not have images in Gopher documents.

Gopher was quite popular until Tim Berners-Lee invented and published the Web protocol, which allowed links inside documents and images.

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