Hypertext

Hypertext is text that carries its own exits: writing displayed on a computer with references—hyperlinks—to other writing, which the reader can reach at once. A hypertext is therefore not so much read as traversed. The writer builds a web of passages (in the vocabulary this site inherits, lexias); the reader chooses a path through them, and the order of reading becomes partly the reader’s own work. Ted Nelson, who coined the word, explained the prefix in the mathematical sense—extension and generality, as in hyperspace—not the medical sense of excess: “hyper-” refers to structure, not size. It names what writing looks like when it is no longer required to be a line.

The idea is older than the machines. In July 1945, in The Atlantic Monthly, Vannevar Bush—who had directed the American scientific war effort—published “As We May Think”, imagining the Memex: a desk that would store a person’s books, records, and correspondence on microfilm and let its owner lay “associative trails” between items, following the jumps of the mind rather than the order of the shelf. The Memex was never built and could only link crudely, chain to chain of microfilm frames; but as a proto-hypertext it is fundamental, because it directly inspired the two men who made hypertext real.

One was Nelson. In 1965 he coined “hypertext” and “hypermedia” for branching, responding text and media, and through the 1960s he conceived Project Xanadu: a universal library of deeply linked documents, with two-way links that know their sources, quotation by reference (transclusion, the original always present in its context), and managed versions—an architecture far richer than anything since deployed at scale. Its first, incomplete implementation was not published until 1998. Meanwhile Nelson worked with Andries van Dam at Brown University on the Hypertext Editing System (1967); its successor FRESS was used in a 1976 poetry class whose students browsed a hyperlinked set of poems and discussion—what van Dam calls arguably the world’s first online scholarly community.

The other was Douglas Engelbart, working independently at the Stanford Research Institute from 1962 on NLS, an oN-Line System for collaborative linked editing. In December 1968 Engelbart demonstrated NLS publicly for the first time—hypertext editing, the mouse, shared screens, remote collaboration—in the ninety-minute session since named “the Mother of All Demos”. Much of the next half-century of personal computing is visible in it, including the premise that a text on a screen is a place where people meet.

The 1980s made hypertext a field. NoteCards, built at Xerox PARC between 1984 and 1987, organized thought as typed, linkable notecards with a graphical browser card for the web of them. Peter Brown’s Guide (1982) brought hypertext to personal computers; Apple’s HyperCard (August 1987) put linked stacks on ordinary desks; and in November 1987 the first ACM Hypertext conference met at Chapel Hill, where among other systems the branched-literature writing software Storyspace was demonstrated. Hypertext had become a technology with a literature, a research community, and an argument about the future of reading.

What conquered the world was the simplest version. Tim Berners-Lee, a scientist at CERN who had built a personal hypertext system (ENQUIRE) as early as 1980, proposed the WorldWideWeb in 1989, prototyped it in the last months of 1990, and released it on the Internet in 1991. The web kept the link and dropped nearly everything else—no two-way links, no transclusion, no registry of what points where—and was rewarded for the trade: from 500 known web servers in 1993 to over 10,000 in 1994, it overshadowed every earlier system. That explosion is the weather of Scibe’s birth year: a work written in conferencing systems in 1994 and carried onto web pages while the web was becoming the world’s default hypertext.

Hypertext survives as both a technology—the node, the link, the trail—and an idea with consequences: that a text can hold more than one order at once, that citation can be travel rather than footnote, and that reading, given real choices, becomes a minor form of authorship. The rest of this wiki follows those consequences: into fiction, into a field of scholarship, and into the online rooms where people wrote to one another before the web arrived.

Sources and further reading