LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Hypertext
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Hypertext is not a new concept. In what researchers consider the first article on hypertext, in 1945 Vannevar Bush proposed the mechanical Memex system, which would maintain links and annotations over printed materials [1]. In the 1960s Theodor Holmes Nelson coined the terms hypertext and hypermedia. Nelson envisioned a world-wide integrated document base of hypertext-linked information that all people would be able to access and work within. While Nelson laid out the specifications for his Xanadu system in the 1960s, the first working prototype appeared only in the late 1990s. Douglas Engelbart demonstrated NLS/Augment, the first distributed, shared-screen, collaborative hypertext system at the 1968 Fall Joint Computer Conference.
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Hypertext is a body of text whose parts are interconnected with links allowing related parts to be accessed easily. It is much like an encyclopedia or dictionary in which words within an entry can be followed to new entries and the entirety of the work is not used linearly or hierarchically. The term was coined in 1965 by Theodor Nelson to describe work he had been doing since about 1960 and which continues as Project Xanadu. Vannevar Bush described some elements of a hypertext system in his article "As We May Think" in The Atlantic in July 1945.
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Hypertext has no beginning or ending, no center or margin, etc. When electronic text is linked or when one node is copy-pasted into another or if texts are semantically linked for a specific purpose, the notion of hierarchy of importance evaporates. Reading begins somewhere and the wreaders construct their own sequence and sometimes even endings.
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Hypertext mirrors the decentered, disseminated self of much poststructuralist critical theory (Landow:76-77). Landow suggests that such thinking is prompted by contemporary shifts in communication technologies: while print encourages the ideal of the single, integral self, electronic text encourages multiple, even conflicting voices. Hypertext offers the possibility of a shifting center, a "multicentered" or "infinitely recenterable" textual universe, with the center to be determined by the active reader. Centers come and go; the act of establishing a momentary center... is an ongoing necessity, to be repeated again and again:
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Hypertext most often refers to text on a computer that will lead the user to other, related information on demand. Hypertext represents a relatively recent innovation to user interfaces, which overcomes some of the limitations of written text. Rather than remaining static like traditional text, hypertext makes possible a dynamic organization of information through links and connections (called hyperlinks). Hypertext can be designed to perform various tasks; for instance when a user "clicks" on it or "hovers" over it, a bubble with a word definition may appear, a web page on a related subject may load, a video clip may run, or an application may open.
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Hypertext is used in many computer-based technologies and so you can find hypertext in many fields of inquiry. For example you can find articles and presentations in about hypertext in conferences about: digital libraries, documentation, education, literature, and user interfaces. There are ... two main conferences for the discussion and study of hypertext in general: the Hypertext conference and Digital Arts and Culture (DAC). Of course the World-Wide Web (WWW) and Annual Conference on World-Wide Web Applications (ACWWWA) will be of interest to many as well.
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