Excerpt:
1945
Vannevar Bush writes an article in Atlantic Monthly about a photo-electrical-mechanical device called a Memex, for memory extension, which could make and follow links between documents on microfiche.
1960s
Doug Engelbart prototypes an "oNLine System" (NLS) which does hypertext browsing editing, email, and so on. He invents the mouse for this purpose. See the Bootstrap Institute library.
Annotation:
This site provides a detailed chronology of the birth and growth of the world wide web. Its pages include links to descriptions of documents and in some cases, the documents themselves, including Tim Berners-Lee's original proposal to create the WWW, press announcements of mergers, and home pages of key individuals in the history of the web. Each year of the chronology includes information about contemporary events that occurred at or near the same time as innovations and advances in world wide web technologies and access. Additionally, each year contains a link to a month-by-month breakdown of the chronology and these pages includes facts and figures. Not surprisingly, this website is particularly user friendly and the navigation is simple. A small key in the bottom left of each page explains icons in a manner that may soon be adopted by others.