The term hyperlink was coined in the mid-1960s by the technologist Ted Nelson,

who also came up with, among other terms,

intertwingularity, which refers to the connectedness and interrelationships found between all types of knowledge,

and teledildonics, which refers to virtual sex, in which both or all parties have devices

that the other or others control remotely.

So yeah, he's a colorful character, but he's also the developer of Project Xanadu,

an alternative to the World Wide Web, that never quite got off the ground, but which is still

in development today, and you can actually find a working version of something approximating what he had in

mind through a modern iteration of the project called Open Zanadu.

The overall concept of Zanadu, though, was predicated on creating a sort of everlasting archive,

a digital repository for all the world's information and published works,

so that these documents,

these words, and the knowledge they encode, could be accessed and discovered by anyone who

wanted them from anywhere. He wanted this archival system to allow creators to build different

versions of their documents, to have forks and branches of the document, which end differently,

or which are aimed at sharing the same information with different audiences.

And he wanted non-sequential writing to be possible, to provide a kind of choose-your-own-adventure

capability for any type of document.

To enable that latter possibility, it was necessary to come up

with novel technologies and concepts that allowed users to navigate texts non-sequentially,

something that didn't exist at the time, it being the 1960s, and the word processor,

not to mention modern computers, not existing yet.

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