Excerpt:
A Little History of the World Wide Web
from 1945 to 1995
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.
Ted Nelson coins the word Hypertext in A File Structure for the Complex, the Changing, and the Indeterminate. 20th National Conference, New York, Association for Computing Machinery, 1965. See also: Literary Machines, a hypertext bibliography.
Andy van Dam and others build the Hypertext Editing System and FRESS in 1967.