Hypertext and Hypercard: Early Development [ELIS Classic]

The ease of linking and hopping from one text to another that we associate today with the World Wide Web was implemented in a different context prior to the Web. The creation of “hypertext” has a long and interesting history prior to the Web, as this article demonstrates. At the time it was issued, the HyperCard software application was expected to be the foundation of a widely-used new means of information organization. We can see now that the key ideas of hypertext were present in HyperCard, without the ease of use of subsequent World Wide Web features.—ELIS Classic, from 1992