@cosmiccitizen

ted nelson was asked to visit brown university in the late 60s to consult on a hypertext system they were building for their time sharing system to store documentation; the result was HES. ted was under the impression that brown university wanted to build a xanadu, whereas what brown actually wanted was a system that borrowed a couple hypertext ideas but was still somewhat amenable to having sections printed out and handed to non-computer-savvy professors. ted left in a huff, feeling like his time had been wasted (and kept a grudge for many years)

HES evolved, and by the late 80s, had transformed into macintosh-based hypertext system Intermedia.

the brown university hypertext systems generally supported bidirectional links and stretchtext, within text; intermedia also supported images (and -- i believe -- image-map links). a tangle of related documents -- called a 'web' in brown terminology -- could be exported, and much of the scholarly content on the early web consisted of Intermedia webs developed as part of term projects exported and converted to html.

HES was probably the first computerized hypertext system to be built and used by a large group. (xanadu implementations often run into technical obstacles, and while ted had published enough information for anybody to write a hypertext system by the end of the 60s, it wasn't until the 70s that the first official xanadu prototypes were implemented -- largely as a result of ted losing a lot of time trying to learn assembly language for a minicomputer his business partners had purchased that it turned out was not suitable for the project.) however, by the time of Intermedia, there were many other hypertext systems: the US navy had systems like KMS and ZOG, commercial products like StorySpace were floating around, and Apple had its own, Hypercard, which it promoted. Intermedia is a fairly 'pure' hypertext system, so it lacked the focus on scripting that Hypercard had; it's a little hard to tell without using both systems heavily but Intermedia and Storyspace seem to have had comparable feature sets. while KMS and ZOG were not widely used for any extended period of time (and were limited to military personnel anyhow), they were not very influential; hypercard was mostly used by kids to make video games and by adults to make the equivalent of powerpoint presentations; the brown university hypertext systems, while now mostly forgotten, were influential for a while because lots of brown university students over the course of 20 years mastered them (mostly students in the soft sciences).

with the turn of the 90s, we got the web (the first popular hypertext system to lack bidirectional links). about five years in, it had a period of rapid commercialization combined with major hype, and this hype translated into purchases of computers and modems by consumers -- many of whom were buying their first computer specifically to use the web (and arguably, specifically to use the web for shopping -- something that wouldn't be even minimally technically secure for another few years and arguably wouldn't really be 'safe' until like 2008). this 'baby boom' of new computer users didn't just overwhelm the existing computer-using and internet-using communities, but also created a large generation of programmers who had no familiarity with or interest in any technology created before 1989, joining the software industry in droves with no formal training. the general lack of awareness of pre-web and non-web hypertext comes out of this demographic shift: the 90s produced a generation of computer programmers and computer users who neither knew nor cared about anything but the web, and would defend even its most obvious and damning design flaws, claiming that no alternative was possible.