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WonderTechnology fact

A hyperlink lets one document open into another, turning web reading into a network of chosen paths.

CERN / Web history

TechnologyLanguage

The story behind the card

In 1945 the American engineer Vannevar Bush imagined a desk-sized machine he called the Memex, which would let a reader join pages of microfilm into personal 'trails', long before computers could do anything like it. Ted Nelson, who read Bush's essay, is credited with coining the term 'link' in the mid-1960s at the start of his Project Xanadu, and in 1968 Douglas Engelbart's team showed working links between pieces of text on a real computer in a famous live demonstration. Tim Berners-Lee, working at the CERN physics laboratory near Geneva, joined the idea to the internet: he proposed the World Wide Web in 1989, and in 1991 pages written in his HTML language began linking to one another, so a decades-old idea became something anyone with a browser could click.

Türkçe oku
Tıklayınca başka bir belgeyi açan bağlantılar (linkler), web'de okumayı okurun kendi seçtiği yollardan oluşan bir ağa çevirdi.

1945'te Amerikalı mühendis Vannevar Bush, okurun mikrofilm sayfalarını birbirine bağlayıp kendi okuma yollarını kurabileceği, masa büyüklüğünde bir makine hayal etti ve ona Memex adını verdi; bilgisayarlar o sırada böyle bir şeyi yapmaktan çok uzaktı. Bush'un yazısını okuyan Ted Nelson, 1960'ların ortasında Xanadu Projesi'ne başlarken bu anlamda “link” terimini ilk kullanan kişi sayılır. Douglas Engelbart'ın ekibi de 1968'deki ünlü canlı gösterimde, gerçek bir bilgisayarda metin parçaları arasında çalışan bağlantıları sergiledi. Fikri internetle buluşturan ise Cenevre yakınlarındaki CERN fizik laboratuvarında çalışan Tim Berners-Lee oldu: 1989'da World Wide Web'i önerdi; 1991'de onun geliştirdiği HTML diliyle yazılan sayfalar birbirine bağlanmaya başladı. Böylece onlarca yıllık bir fikir, tarayıcısı olan herkesin tıklayabileceği bir şeye dönüştü.

Sources and further reading

Background reading: Hyperlink
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