by DonHopkins | 2025-10-05 22:39:16+00:00
I (or a commenter who goes by the same name) contacted the author Elise Blanchard and introduced her to Ben Shneiderman, and gave her some links to our work on HyperTIES. She wrote a followup article with more detailed information.

Revisiting why hyperlinks are blue:

https://blog.mozilla.org/en/internet-culture/why-are-hyperli...

It wasn't just a random or intuitive choice, but the results of many empirical studies and experiments (which is Ben's whole "thing", and unfortunately extremely rare these days):

>“We conducted approximately 20 empirical studies of many design variables which were reported at the Hypertext 1987 conference and in array of journals and books. Issues such as the use of light blue highlighting as the default color for links, the inclusion of a history stack, easy access to a BACK button, article length, and global string search were all studied empirically.”

Hypertext on Hypertext CACM1988 - Ben demonstrating HyperTIES with blue hyperlinks, the system that influenced Tim:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29b4O2xxeqg

Here is my post to the hn discussion of her first article, included an email Ben wrote to me a year before the article, full of citations and links to papers and web pages about it:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29921532

>Ben Shneiderman recalled that "Tim told me at the time that he was influenced by our design as he saw it in the Hypertext on Hypertext project".

>Ben Shneiderman wrote the following email to John Gilmore and I, in response to a question John asked me about the origin of the term "hyperlink" raised in a discussion on the Internet History mailing list. John then forwarded Ben's email to the Internet History mailing list.

https://elists.isoc.org/pipermail/internet-history/2020-Apri...

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From: Ben Shneiderman <ben at cs.umd.edu> To: Don Hopkins <don at donhopkins.com> CC: John Gilmore <gnu at toad.com>, Ben Shneiderman <ben at cs.umd.edu> Subject: RE: [ih] origins of the term "hyperlink" X-ASG-Orig-Subj: RE: [ih] origins of the term "hyperlink" Date: Mon, 13 Apr 2020 15:15:52 +0000

HI Don (and Jack Gilmore),

Thanks for including me in this conversation.

I do not have a claim for the term “hyperlinks” and don’t know when it came into use. My claim is for the visual interface for showing highlighted selectable links embedded in paragraphs. This is what we called embedded menu items in that I think is an influential paper on the topic, which was peer-reviewed and published in the CACM in April 1986.

https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/5684.5687

http://www.cs.umd.edu/~ben/papers/Koved1986Embedded.pdf

While Engelbart had shown a list that could be selected by pointing and clicking in 1968, I claim the idea of embedded highlighted selectable text in paragraphs. This was implemented by grad student Daniel Ostroff and described in:

Ewing J, Mehrabanzad S, Sheck S, Ostroff D and Shneiderman B (1986), "An experimental comparison of a mouse and arrow-jump keys for an interactive encyclopedia", International Journal of Man-Machine Studies, Jan., 1986, Vol 24, pp. 29-45.

[Abstract] [BibTeX] [DOI]

Ostroff D and Shneiderman B (1988), "Selection devices for users of an electronic encyclopedia: an empirical comparison of four possibilities", Information Processing and Management, Nov., 1988, Vol 24(6), pp. 665-680.

[Abstract] [BibTeX] [DOI]

I think the 1988 paper was the earlier study, but the publication took a while.

My students conducted more than a dozen experiments (unpublished) on different ways of highlighting and selection using current screens, e.g. green screens only permitted, bold, underscore, blinking, and I think italic(???). When we had a color screen we tried different color highlighted links. While red made the links easier to spot, user comprehension and recollection of the content declined. We chose the light blue, which Tim adopted.

His systems with embedded menus (or hot spots), where a significant user interface improvement over early systems such as Gopher. But Tim told me at the time that he was influenced by our design as he saw it in the Hypertext on Hypertext project that we used Hyperties to build for the July 1988 CACM that held the articles from the July 1987 Hypertext conference at the University of North Carolina. The ACM sold 4000 copies of our Hypertext on Hypertext disks.

Our history is here:

https://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/hyperties/

and the video is very helpful in showing the design we used, which is what I think Tim built on for his WWW prototypes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29b4O2xxeqg

So in summary, I don’t know who coined hypertext, but I do think our work visual and interaction design was influential.

Our Hyperties system was picked up by Cognetics Corporation (around 1987) who made a modestly successful commercial run with it, doing dozens of corporate projects, most notably the Hewlett-Packard user manual for their Laserjet 4 was distributed as a Hyperties disk.

Hyperties was the name we shifted to after we got a stop and desist order from a lawyer because our TIES (The Interactive Encyclopedia System) conflicted with an existing product. By then “hyper” was a growing term.

Let me know if this helps, and what other questions you have…. Ben

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Here's more information about our work on HyperTIES and other stuff like pie menus and tabbed windows at the University of Maryland Human Computer Interaction Lab:

HyperTIES Discussions from Hacker News

https://donhopkins.medium.com/hyperties-discussions-from-hac...

Designing to Facilitate Browsing: A Look Back at the Hyperties Workstation Browser By Ben Shneiderman, Catherine Plaisant, Rodrigo Botafogo, Don Hopkins, William Weiland. Published in Hypermedia, vol. 3, 2 (1991)101–117.

https://donhopkins.medium.com/designing-to-facilitate-browsi...