hypertext

We do not read hypertext the same way we read a novel, and browsing the Web is a different experience from reading a book or newspaper.

1995, Gary Wolf, "The Curse of Xanadu", WIRED Did Nelson realize at the time that he had met Xanadu's second parent? Probably not. The inventor scattered his ideas as widely as possible, with little care about where they landed. But as the decades passed, it would be Gregory who oversaw the attempt to transform Xanadu into a real product. He never received much public notice, but through all the project's painful deaths and rebirths, Gregory's commitment to Nelson's dream of a universal hypertext library never waned. If Ted Nelson is Xanadu's profligate father, Roger Gregory is Xanadu's devoted mother, and in retrospect, his role appears to have been intertwined with a terrible element of sacrifice.

A hypertext system, then, is a memex-like device for creating and manipulating hypertexts, both for on-line browsing, and for reducing selected portions of such texts to . .