Sidebar to Jakob Nielsen 's column on history's lessons for Java.

Excerpt from the history chapter in my book Multimedia and Hypertext: The Internet and Beyond

1945 Vannevar Bush proposes Memex
1965 Ted Nelson coins the word " hypertext " (later elaborated in his pioneering book Literary Machines)
1967 The Hypertext Editing System and FRESS, Brown University, Andy van Dam
1968 Doug Engelbart demo of NLS system at FJCC
1975 ZOG (now KMS): CMU
1978 Aspen Movie Map , first hypermedia videodisk, Andy Lippman, MIT Architecture Machine Group (now Media Lab)
1984 Filevision from Telos; limited hypermedia database widely available for the Macintosh
1985 Symbolics Document Examiner , Janet Walker
1985 Intermedia, Brown University, Norman Meyrowitz
1986 OWL introduces Guide, first widely available hypertext
1987 Apple introduces HyperCard , Bill Atkinson
1987 Hypertext'87 first major conference on hypertext
1991 World Wide Web at CERN becomes first global hypertext, Tim Berners-Lee
1992 New York Times Book Review cover story on hypertext fiction
1993 Mosaic anointed Internet killer app, National Center for Supercomputing Applications
1993 A Hard Day's Night becomes the first full-length feature film in hypermedia (originally for Macintosh; now also available for Windows)
1993 Hypermedia encyclopedias sell more copies than print encyclopedias
1995 Netscape Corp. gains market value of almost $3B on first day of stock market trading (1998: AOL buys Netscape for $4B)

See Also:

• My report from a 1994 study of Web usability, including screen shots of several of the early sites and findings about their usability (remarkably, most of these early findings are still applicable to modern site usability)
• List of recommended books about hypertext and its history (many richly illustrated with screenshots)
• WWW Consortium's list of hypertext projects
• Hobbes' Internet timeline
• The Memex and Beyond history of hypertext research site