Ted Nelson coined the term "hypertext" in the 1960s and worked on a complex system called Project Xanadu. However, his vision was seen as overly ambitious and impractical by many. Even when early hypertext systems were developed in the 1980s, they were often viewed as niche tools for specialized applications rather than a foundation for global information sharing.
The true potential of hypertext was realized when Tim Berners-Lee proposed the World Wide Web in 1989 while working at CERN. His implementation of hypertext was simpler than previous concepts, using: