As soon as hypertext was unveiled to the public in 1968 at the Convention Center of San Francisco in the United States, technology experts knew it was unique. The demonstration, now known as the "Mother of All Demos," showed how this tool for data organization enabled the user to read information, not just in the linear way we read regular text, but for the first time in a dynamic and interactive way. Hypertext later became the fundamental-language of the Internet in Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML), and has revolutionized the way information is accessed.
Whereas standard text is read linearly (for instance, Western scripts are read left to right, top to bottom), hypertext allowed the user to retrieve information by “clicking" on link's that shifted the page, opened further texts, and activated video and audio. The forerunner of this breakthrough was called the Memex system (from MEMory Extender), imagined by U.S. engineer Vannevar Bush in his 1945 article "As We May Think" in The Atlantic Monthly. Bush envisaged an individual at a mechanical desk able to access information in the form of linked microfilm rolls.
The article is said to have inspired the creation of hypertext by two young computer scientists, Ted Nelson [b. 1937) and Andries van Dam (b. 1938). While working at Brown University, Nelson coined the word "hypertext" in 1963 to describe' his vision of a fully indexed information system. Nelson and van Dam went on to develop the "Hypertext Editing System," the research project that led to the formation of the standard hypertext language and the historic "Mother of all Demos" three years later.
