How the Internet Works, Eighth Edition

Chapter 20. How Hypertext Works

In the late 1960s, a computer scientist named Ted Nelson introduced hypertext, a concept that lays the foundation for the World Wide Web and its connections between documents, or pages.

Nelson wanted to create a new way of exploring information. He wanted to provide the reader with a spontaneous means of accessing more and more in-depth information about something that sparked the reader’s interest when reading text on the page. Rather than reading a document from beginning to end, digesting the material in a sequential order, the reader could highlight a word and receive more information on the meaning ...