The Birth of the Internet

By 1991, Berners-Lee had figured out how to apply his hyperlinks to the Internet, and the World Wide Web was born. Hypertext was conceived and named in 1965 by Ted Nelson, and it is the basis of the World Wide Web—and what makes search engines possible. Nelson imagined computer text that would be nonlinear, so instead of reading a text from beginning to end, one could (in his example) see that someone has quoted something and then go directly to the source of the quotation. We now depend on hyperlinks to give us the ability to maneuver around the World Wide Web.