Today, hyperlinks are so common that we barely notice them. You used one to reach this article, and you'll likely find several more inside it. If we stick to the formal definition of an "interface element", hyperlinks might seem trivial, but they have a wonderful history that stretches from Vannevar Bush's famous Memex to its modern incarnation, passing through the invention of the World Wide Web itself and parallel projects like HyperCards.
The Hyperlink's Impact
Imagine today's Web without hyperlinks. Could it even exist? The cascade of code behind every page and every click enables things that were impossible just a few decades ago, yet are now taken for granted. Until someone comes up with a better idea, hyperlinks will remain a fundamental pillar of electronic communication. Early developers had few resources—just a piece of underlined text highlighted in blue—but these days almost anything can act as a hyperlink, from hearts and thumbs-up icons to photos and videos.
Margaret Gould Stewart, vice president of product design at Facebook (and previously at YouTube/Google), explains the essence of the hyperlink and the limitations people faced before it became widely available. For instance, you had to physically travel to a library, request a book, and wait weeks for someone to return it before you could work or study. But the problem wasn't just accessing information—it was that we were and still are, generating ever more of it.
From Memex to HyperCard
This brings us to 1945 and the historic Memex of Vannevar Bush, who essentially proposed linking books, records, and communications mechanically in a kind of personal super library. Project Xanadu sought to expand the original concept of the Memex and became the first major hypertext project that could have beaten the World Wide Web to the punch... but it arrived 38 years too late.
HyperTIES (derived from TIES, or The Interactive Encyclopedia System, from 1983) was the first commercial solution to use plain text as a hyperlink. It was Bill Atkinson and Apple's HyperCards that gave hyperlinks a non-linear profile, enabling jumps from one place to another within the same story.
Margaret compares hyperlinks to Lego bricks: small basic blocks that don't do much on their own but multiply their potential when connected together. They aren't perfect, of course—hyperlinks break by the millions, and their non-linear nature can lead us to the strangest places—but the modern web would be an extremely limited space without them.
