Editing Hyperlink (section)

==History==
[[File:SRI ARC Engelbart Nov 1969.jpg|thumb|Douglas Engelbart and his team at [[SRI International|SRI]], 1969]]
The term "link" was coined in 1965 (or possibly 1964) by [[Ted Nelson]] at the start of [[Project Xanadu]]. Nelson had been inspired by "[[As We May Think]]", a popular 1945 essay by [[Vannevar Bush]]. In the essay, Bush described a microfilm-based machine (the [[Memex]]) in which one could link any two pages of information into a "trail" of related information, and then scroll back and forth among pages in a trail as if they were on a single microfilm reel.

In a series of books and articles published from 1964 through 1980, Nelson transposed Bush's concept of automated cross-referencing into the computer context, made it applicable to specific text strings rather than whole pages, generalized it from a local desk-sized machine to a theoretical proprietary worldwide computer network, and advocated the creation of such a network. Though Nelson's Xanadu Corporation was eventually funded by [[Autodesk]] in the 1980s, it never created this proprietary public-access network. Meanwhile, working independently, a team led by [[Douglas Engelbart]] (with [[Jeff Rulifson]] as chief [[programmer]]) was the first to implement the hyperlink concept for scrolling within a single document (1966), and soon after for connecting between paragraphs within separate documents (1968), with [[NLS (computer system)|NLS]]. [[Ben Shneiderman]] working with graduate student Dan Ostroff designed and implemented the highlighted link in the HyperTIES system in 1983.  HyperTIES was used to produce the world's first electronic journal, the July 1988 [[Communications of the ACM]], which was cited as the source for the link concept in [[Tim Berners-Lee]]'s Spring 1989 manifesto for the Web.  In 1988, [[Ben Shneiderman]] and Greg Kearsley used HyperTIES to publish "Hypertext Hands-On!", the world's first electronic book.{{citation needed|date=February 2019|reason=First electronic book is a bold claim.}}

Released in 1987 for the [[Mac (computer)|Apple Macintosh]], the database program [[HyperCard]] allowed for hyperlinking between various pages within a document, as well as to other documents and separate applications on the same computer.<ref name='"Search paths"'>{{cite book |last1=(Atkinson |first1=Bill?) |title=Hypercard User's Guide |date=1987 |publisher=Apple Computer Inc |page=49 |edition=1 |url=https://vintageapple.org/macprogramming/pdf/HyperCard_Users_Guide_1987.pdf#page=73 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20180123113437/http://vintageapple.org/macprogramming/pdf/HyperCard_Users_Guide_1987.pdf |archive-date=2018-01-23 |url-status=live |ref=p.49 |chapter=3}}</ref> In 1990, [[Windows Help]], which was introduced with [[Microsoft Windows 3.0]], had widespread use of hyperlinks to link different pages in a single [[Online help|help file]] together; in addition, it had a visually different kind of hyperlink that caused a popup help message to appear when clicked, usually to give definitions of terms introduced on the help page. The first widely used open protocol that included hyperlinks from any Internet site to any other Internet site was the [[Gopher (protocol)|Gopher protocol]] from 1991. It was soon eclipsed by HTML after the 1993 release of the [[Mosaic (web browser)|Mosaic browser]] (which could handle Gopher links as well as HTML links). HTML's advantage was the ability to mix graphics, text, and hyperlinks, unlike Gopher, which just had menu-structured text and hyperlinks.