“Suppose within every book there is another book,, and within every letter in every page another volume constantly unfolding, but these volumes take no space on the desk. Suppose knowledge could be reduced to a quintessence, held within a picture, a sign, held within a place which is no place.” —Hilary Mantel, 2009

After the first test of the atomic bomb in 1945, Vannevar Bush began to believe that creating an intertextual link connecting two pieces of research would be essential to organize thought in an era that was seen as an exponential process of invention and information overload. He wrote in “As We May Think", a visionary essay, that “our methods of transmitting and reviewing the results of research are generations old and by now totally inadequate.” The human mind is organized as a network of association. The brain itself is a 3D web of nerve nodes and synapse connections. By organizing knowledge in a similar network, thought and information flow together cohesively; This would allow ideas to transcend the strict categorization that indexes follow (Turow).

Bush conceived the design of a computing device called the Memex– short for memory extension– that would connect multiple documents within a single machine. When reading a document, the user could insert a code that would connect a word in the document to any other, creating a network of nested links. Moreover, the associative trails produced by a researcher as he or she examined the literature would provide pathways that future users of the Memex could follow (Turow).

Ideation of the Memex from As We May Think

The Memex inspired the ideas of Ted Nelson and Douglas Engelbart, who created the first digital versions of the now well-recognized hyperlink. Nelson coined the terms hyperlink and hypertext in his project Xanadu Hypertext System, with the goal of expanding the hyperlink to a worldwide computer network that shares linked material. The first computer-based hyperlink was demonstrated in 1968 by Engelbart where one could jump between paragraphs on separate documents.

“Text represents not a fixed linear sequence, but functions as a network to be actively composed” (Sandbothe). To Bush, Nelson, and Engelbart, the organization of knowledge into categories rather than interconnected nodes limits human thought. In regards to the new possibilities the hyperlink proposes, Ted Nelson said in 1965: “It is almost everywhere necessary to deal with deep structural changes in the arrangement of ideas and things.”

“A hypertext link is the electronic representation of a perceived relationship between two pieces of material, which become nodes once the relationship has been instantiated electronically. That is, the link simulates the connections in the mind of the author or reader” (Slatin). Hypermedia lets us see information not as isolated, but intertwined.

Later, the development of HTML, a code-based markup language for rendering hypertext, and Http, a medium to send HTML over the internet, made the textual hypermedium accessible, as Nelson originally envisioned.

However, there were iterations of hypermedia long before the digital age.

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