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.