Hypertext is text that contains links to other text, so a reader can jump from one document to another by following a reference rather than reading in a straight line. The word was coined by Ted Nelson in his 1965 paper “A File Structure for the Complex, the Changing, and the Indeterminate,” presented at the ACM National Conference. Nelson used “hypertext” to describe written or pictorial material interconnected so richly that it could not conveniently be laid out on flat paper.
The idea predated any practical way to do it on a large scale. For decades hypertext lived mostly in research systems and standalone programs, where the links could only point within a single machine or document set.
The breakthrough was connecting hypertext to a network. Tim Berners-Lee’s 1989 CERN proposal defined hypertext as “human-readable information linked together in an unconstrained way,” and proposed building a system where a link could point to a document on any computer anywhere. That combination, hypertext plus the internet, became the World Wide Web.
On the Web, hypertext is everywhere: the link is the basic unit of navigation. The “ht” in HTTP and HTML stands for hypertext, a direct nod to the concept Nelson named more than half a century ago.