[ih] origins of the term "hyperlink"

[Steve Crocker]

Jeff and Vint,

Thanks for this very informative dialog.  One small question about a date:

> Bush published the idea in 1945. Engelbart named the idea "links" about
> 1945 but did not tell anyone.

Was it really 1945 when Engelbart names the idea “links”?  I’m guessing this was an unintended typo.

Steve

Sent from my iPhone

> On Apr 12, 2020, at 12:45 PM, vinton cerf via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
> 
> I asked Jeff Rulifson if he could help us figure out when "hyperlink"
> entered into usage. Jeff was the principal programmer for Douglas
> Engelbart's NLS editing system in which such links were introduced. Ted
> Nelson coined terms like "hypertext" in his Xanadu concept - the two were
> contemporary in the 1960s.
> 
> Here is Jeff's response:
> 
> Vannevar Bush, (Atlantic Monthly, July 1945, p 107) introduces the idea of
> "associative indexing, the basic idea of which is a provision whereby any
> item may be caused at will to select immediately and automatically
> another." Bush goes on to discuss the idea of a named trail of such
> associations. Engelbart's contemporaneous handwritten marginal notes in his
> copy of the magazine call such a trail "links". The Computer History Museum
> has a photocopy of Doug's personal copy with his handwritten marginal
> notes. (I have a TIFF of their copy.)
> 
> By the time of the 1968 demo, I had fully implemented links. I used a very
> general implementation. A link had two parts: the name of a document and a
> search command. The named document could be the current document or any
> other document available for searching. The search command was a regular
> expression. Users could make their links very simple or extremely
> sophisticated. As far as I know, this was the first general implementation.
> 
> In 1965, Ted Nelson had coined the term hypertext but never had an
> implementation. I believe he used the term links but I cannot find the
> paper for verification.
> 
> By 1967, not knowing about Nelson or Engelbart, Andy van Dam had built a
> system called HES. Andy's system had the notion of links and they were
> called "links". (See
> http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/4/1/000081/000081.html)
> 
> Bush published the idea in 1945. Engelbart named the idea "links" about
> 1945 but did not tell anyone. Andy used links in a line editor in 1967 and
> I implemented a general version in 1968. Up till then, they were called
> links.
> 
> When was "hyper" added as a prefix?
> 
> The article at
> https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/seeing-what-others-dont/201801/the-invention-hyperlinks
> claims Ben Shneiderman invented them in 1988 and implies Shneiderman coined
> the term. You can see more of Shneiderman's claims at
> http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/hyperties/. Shneiderman added the prefix "hyper"
> 43 years after Doug named associative indexing "links" and 20 years after
> my implementation.
> 
> The article at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperlink#History attributes
> the term hyperlinks to Nelson in 1965. But, to my knowledge, Nelson used
> the term "links" at that time.
> 
> My bet would be that hyper was added between 1980 and 1987. Maybe it was a
> journalist and we will never know.
> 
> Jeff
> 
> 
> -------
> 
> Also:
> [image: Bush with Engelbart Annotation.png]
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