you can kind of break the history of hypertext into three lineages, with different lenses:

• the engineer (Doug Engelbart’s lineage)
• the scholar (Ted Nelson’s lineage) and, starting in the 80s, and
• the publisher (which ate the other two)

Ted & Doug were very concerned with hypertext as an evolving thing — with creating hypertext iteratively, and using the affordances of hypertext as a tool for thought. Hypertext as marginal notes, correspondence tables, new indexes, common-place books, revision history.

This is how the social dimension was expected to play in some of these systems. For Doug, NLS/Augment was this collaboration platform for tight-knit engineering teams. For Ted, Xanadu was a natural extension of the republic of letters, making visible the invisible threads of scholarly history. You take previously fallible processes like quoting, citation, and marginal notes, & remove manual effort to free up the imaginative use.

Thing is, collaborative hypertext systems weren’t super interesting on small home computers, which had poor networking support & not much storage. You saw them in the navy, or at universities, or other places where a home brewed local hypertext system was put on top of time share. (And this also doesn’t mean these systems weren’t hampered. Like, InterMedia crosses more off the is-it-hypertext checklist than the web but you watch a demo and it was clearly an enormous pain to use because they followed the mac UX manual — making it easy to learn by removing everything that could possibly…