The Origins of the Underline as Visual
Representation of the Hyperlink on the Web: A
Case Study in Skeuomorphism
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Romano, John J. 2016. The Origins of the Underline as Visual Representation of the Hyperlink on
the Web: A Case Study in Skeuomorphism. Master's thesis, Harvard Extension School.

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The Origins of the Underline as Visual Representation of theHyperlink on the Web: A Case Study in Skeuomorphism

John J Romano

A Thesis in the Field of Visual Arts
for the Degree of Master of Liberal Arts in Extension Studies

Harvard University
November 2016

Abstract

This thesis investigates the process by which the underline came to be used as thedefault signifier of hyperlinks on the World Wide Web. Created in 1990 by Tim BernersLee, the web quickly became the most used hypertext system in the world, and mostbrowsers default to indicating hyperlinks with an underline. To answer the question of
why the underline was chosen over competing demarcation techniques, the thesis applies
the methods of history of technology and sociology of technology. Before the inventionof the web, the underline–also known as the vinculum–was used in many contexts inwriting systems; collecting entities together to form a whole and ascribing additional
meaning to the content. This early usage made the underline a natural choice,semantically, as a hyperlink signifier. The technological context in which the web was
created also played a significant role in the use of the underline. Early computer systems
were limited in their display capacities and the interfaces created on them were
influenced by these constraints. Specifically, the NeXT computer on which Berners-Lee
developed the web made underlining text very simple using its Interface Builder
software. The combination of the existing semantic meaning of the underline in written
language, coupled with the affordances of contemporary computer systems resulted in thecommonplace use of the underline to signify hyperlinks.

Table of Contents

I. Introduction ..................................................................................................................... 1
II. The Histories of the Underline and the Visual Representation of Hyperlinks ............... 9
The History of the Underline .................................................................................. 9
Ancient History ......................................................................................... 10
Paper Systems ........................................................................................... 16
The Typewriter.......................................................................................... 19
Telegraphy ................................................................................................ 24
Visual Representations of Hyperlinks Before the Web ........................................ 27
The Memex ............................................................................................... 30
The Typewriter, Part II ............................................................................. 31
Early Hypertext Systems........................................................................... 33
Display Adapters....................................................................................... 40
III. The Invention of the Web and Underline as Hyperlink Semaphore ........................... 50
Contemporary Hypertext Systems ........................................................................ 50
HyperCard ................................................................................................. 50
Minitel ....................................................................................................... 55
Gopher....................................................................................................... 57
NeXTSTEP ........................................................................................................... 60
Tim Berners-Lee and the World Wide Web Standards ........................................ 66
HTML ....................................................................................................... 70
The Demonstration Browsers ................................................................... 76
Early Browsers ...................................................................................................... 80
Mosaic and its Spawn ........................................................................................... 82
Usability and the Future ........................................................................................ 85
IV. Conclusion .................................................................................................................. 89
Appendix ........................................................................................................................... 92
Bibliography ..................................................................................................................... 94

Chapter I
Introduction

The hyperlink is one of the most pervasive user interface elements on earth,featured on billions of web pages accessed daily by hundreds of millions of users.
Despite its ubiquity, there has not been a complete investigation as to the origin anddevelopment of its visual representation on the web. In bringing to light the origin of theunderline as a visual symbol for hyperlinks on the web, I researched the history of eachof those domains: the underline, the hyperlink, and the web. I found three questions thatwere insufficiently addressed in the literature, one about each topic. The primary
question–essentially, why did Tim Berners-Lee choose the underline to represent
hyperlinks–will be addressed in Chapter III. Chapter II will address the other twoquestions, the answers to which should set the stage for the former and give insight into
the milieu in which Berners-Lee was creating. The first of these questions relates to theunderline: what did the underline represent before the invention of the web? To answer
this question, I follow its use throughout the known history of writing and demonstrate
that, while it has been used in many writing systems, it shares the common meaning oftying pieces of text together, allowing them to act as a group. This usage remains true
across languages and various media of reproduction. Secondly, Chapter II will illuminate
the visual representation of the hyperlink throughout the history of hypertext systems.
Although eventually eclipsed in popularity by the web, early popular hypertext systems
used a variety of modalities of indicating hyperlinks. An investigation of these systems

2
reveals that the use of the underline to represent links on the web was not the only
possible choice. This investigation is also important because many other histories ofhypertext choose to focus on the information architectural and information theoreticalaspects of these hypertext systems, rather than the visual and presentational aspects. The
answers to these two questions are interesting in their own right, but and they will also
properly contextualize Berners-Lee’s invention of the web and his choice of theunderline.
The use of the underline on the web does not exist in a vacuum, but is part of an
identifiable process within the discipline of graphic design. The history of graphic designspans many media and modes of mechanical reproduction–scribal transcription, movable
type, offset printing, desktop publishing, web sites, and many more–each with their own
distinct graphical identities and tropes. Each medium’s aesthetic is shaped by theinterplay between the technical limitations of the novel medium and innovation on thepart of designers, but another important factor is the established tropes of extant media.
Frequently, designers and inventors incorporate aesthetic traits from earlier media into
their designs for new media, even if those traits originally arose for technical reasons thatmany no longer apply; this process is termed skeuomorphism. The term was first coinedby H. Colley March in the 1889 edition of the Transactions of the Lancashire andCheshire Antiquarian Society and refers to the ornamental use of material aspects ofartifacts which became unnecessary due to technical improvements (166). Many such
examples are documented in the history of print; this thesis examines how
skeuomorphism continues to function in the age of web publishing. The “default”
solutions that define skeuomorphism have practical application in that they ease adoption

3
by “priming” users for a particular choice. To this end, this paper demonstrates how
earlier media influenced the aesthetics of early web design, specifically in regard to
hyperlink, by charting the history of both the underline and hypertext systems up to thepoint of their convergence.
Early hypertext systems, and especially the web, created a new and distinct
medium for sharing content and required novel graphic design treatments to convey theiruse. Hyperlinking is elemental to the medium and did not have direct precedence inprevious media, and thus required an innovative design to separate it from surrounding
text. Though the early web saw many different methods of indicating hyperlinks, aconsensus coalesced around the underline as the default visual signifier. Hypermedia as aconcept is generally traced back to Vannevar Bush’s Memex, a notional microfilm-based
machine capable of creating and storing arbitrary linkages between pieces of information,
akin to the workings of the brain (Bush). The terms describing such a system–“hyperlink”
and “hypermedia”–were developed by Ted Nelson (Berners-Lee & Fischetti 219). Many
offline hypertext systems were developed, but none flourished as a widespread, global
medium until Tim Berners-Lee developed the World Wide Web (comprised of the HTTP
protocol, HTML markup language, URI specification, and the WorldWideWeb
demonstration browser) in 1990 (Berners-Lee & Fischetti 30). His development built on
earlier methods of sharing content over the Internet, but made them visually accessible
and freely linkable, all without the need for a central authority. Berners-Lee’s
specification was intentionally minimal so as not to inhibit future innovation, and left
questions of visual presentation open for browser developers to implement. As a result,
early browsers such as UdiWWW used many different modalities to represent links on a4page (Obendorf & Weinreich 3), including the use of color, boxes, icons, and hotkeys.
Berners-Lee’s demonstration browser and its major successor, Mosaic, were strong
influences on underline usage adoption, and by the time Netscape (1994) and Internet
Explorer (1995) were released, the decision to use underlining was the de facto standard.
Many books have been written on hypermedia, but this study will focus on thevisual aspects, which have been overlooked. For example, Jakob Nielsen wrote Hypertext
and Hypermedia in 1990, presenting an overview of hypermedia history, but giving scantattention to presentational aspects of the hyperlinks of these systems. His 1995 follow up,
Multimedia and Hypertext was released well after the web had taken off, but still glossed
over the specifics of link presentation. The elision of this topic can be attributed to theamount of material covered, but I believe that insufficient attention was paid. Therefore, I
intend to give a different type of history of hypertext, one centered on the display aspectsof links, and demonstrating the material considerations which led to their creation.
The second chapter of this paper tracks the history of the underline in its usage in
written language to give historical precedent to its eventual use on the web. In much thesame way that Keith Houston does in his book Shady Characters, this chapter will
explore the somewhat hidden history of the underline in all of its uses. This precedent
extends back to ancient Rome, and beyond; the Romans used the vinculum (in the form ofboth under- and over-lining) to distinguish Roman numerals from letters in running text
(spaces were not used to break up words). Later, especially into the Middle Ages, thevinculum was used to indicate numeral multiplication (Smith 60). Early manuscripts used
underlining along with glosses and marginalia to highlight important passages in texts.
Unlike other forms of highlighting, underlining is quite easy and can be performed on

5paper with any writing instrument. The underline continues to be used for notation andemphasis by book readers and was adopted in areas related to hyperlink-like media,
including in library science, where words were underlined to indicate the word by whicha book was filed. The second chapter will show how the historical usage of the underline,
coupled with the existing technological milieu, predisposed developers to select theunderline.
The underline came into its own as a cultural force with the invention of thetypewriter. Since typewriters generally contain only a single font, variants such as italics,
bold (other than double-typing), small-caps, and other techniques were not readily
available, so the underline was used to satisfy many needs. On a typewriter, creating an
underline was just a matter of over-typing with an underscore, so it could be implemented
easily without much modification to the machine. Monospaced typewriters made thisvery easy because each character was the same width as an underscore, but a moreadvanced technology was required to do this well on a later variable-width typewriter,such as the IBM Electric Executive Typewriter released in 1944 (“IBM Typewriter
Milestones”). Perhaps not coincidentally, some of the first devices used as terminals tointeract with mainframe computers were based on electric typewriters. The inherent
limitations of using a typewriter-like device as the input/output device for a computer
system shaped the development of early computer systems, and thus early hypertext
systems.
As computers have replaced typewriters, and much printed matter as well, theunderline has continued to be used, but the precise manner has evolved. Early on, web
designers would sometimes use the underline to indicate emphasis (like they would on

6earlier media) as well as for indicating links. The HTML specification allowed this withan underline tag. This caused confusion for users who quickly grew to expect underlined
text to be clickable. Over time it has become best practice to avoid using underlining for
purposes other than indicating links, showing how the ubiquity of hypertext has changed
common usage ("Semantics, Structure, and APIs of HTML Documents"). Chapter III will
discuss the evolution of the HTML standard, and how it shaped the visual representationof hyperlinks.
When Tim Berners-Lee developed the web on the then-relatively-new NeXT
computer using the NeXTSTEP operating system in 1990, he chose to represent links
with underlines, and thus set a precedent for other early browsers. Some other browser
implementations, such as UdiWWW, chose alternative methods of showing links.
Chapter III will track the influence that Berners-Lee’s first browser had on thedevelopment of subsequent browsers, both through direct code transfer as well as stylistic
influence. Some previous authors have generally attributed the ascendency of theunderline (rather than just colored text) to the fact that many early computers–such as the
NeXT–lacked color displays, although this argument greatly simplifies the manytechnological and cultural factors that led to the use of the underline (Obendorf &Weinreich 2). For instance, this argument does not exclude many other possible modes ofrepresenting a link that were not ultimately chosen, such as brackets, boxes, or icons,
which were all used in some early hypertext systems. This thesis will demonstrate thatthe earlier use of underlining in other fields, such as library science, and in other media,
such as the typewritten page, created an understanding of underlining that made its use to7represent the hyperlink natural and intuitive, leading to its eventual near-universal
adoption.
This thesis will approach the topic through multiple theoretical lenses, owing to
the diversity of topics covered. The research into the pre-web usage of the underline isprimary historical, dipping into linguistics, mathematics, and the history and sociology oftechnology. When discussing the adoption of the web, a sociology of technology
approach is used to explicate its success. Critically, I do not make an a posteriori
argument about the success of the web: at each stage of its development I document its
challenges, alternatives, and dead ends. Pinch and Bijker, in Social Construction of Facts
and Artefacts, critique the history of science approach which they find overly focused on
descriptive historiography, claiming that “preference for successful innovations seems tolead scholars to assume that the success of an artefact is an explanation of its subsequentdevelopment.” As a result, they continue, some “[h]istorians of technology often seem
content to rely on the manifest success of the artefact as evidence that no further
explanatory work needs to be done.” I will attempt to avoid this pitfall using thesociology of technology approach where “[t]he success of an artefact is precisely whatneeds to be explained. For a sociological theory of technology it should be theexplanandum, not the explanans” (406).
The web exists dually as a technological invention and a graphical medium, so
this study will also consider the aesthetics of the web, and the underline on the web,throughout. The underline bears information graphically and as Tufte defines it in The
Visual Display of Quantitative Information, graphical excellence “consists of complex
ideas communicated with clarity, precision, and efficiency” (51). While Tufte may seem

8like an inappropriate touchstone when viewing the web as a medium–his work, after all,is on quantitative information)–the web is simultaneously a directed graph consisting ofnodes and edges: a type of data structure. Tufte presents the concept of data-ink–the
essential content of a graphical presentation–the loss of any of which would remove
information. An efficient graphical representation of data will use a very high ratio of
data-ink to total ink (93). I will show that the underline was leveraged to great effect byearly browser developers to allow users to easily understand the vast complexity of the
web with the use of a very simple signifier (high data-ink ratio), while also showing thatcompeting proposals failed to improve on it.
I am undertaking this study to bring understanding to the use of skeuomorphismfor good design–through helpful metaphors–as well as for bad design–in the case of lazyshorthands–as well as filling in an important lacuna in the history of the web. The
exploration of the underline brings together sources from multiple areas of study–archeology, linguistics, mathematics–to chart how the underline has been used, and what
it has meant throughout history. The underline is just one example of the many visualelements that we seamlessly interact with daily on the web, but to which we give little
consideration. Considering the history of the underline also adds to web history by fillingin the creation story of one of the most fundamental elements of web design, thehyperlink. This research provides insight about user interface creation that may be of help
to those creating and improving user interface elements.

Chapter II
The Histories of the Underline and the Visual Representation of Hyperlinks

The History of the Underline
The underline and the closely related overline have a long precedent in the writing
systems of the western world, as supported by archeological evidence from as early as
17,000 years ago. As the name implies, an underline is a horizontal line drawn below apiece of text, while an overline is one drawn over it. It seems that the usage of the line toconnect a series of items to each other is a very natural affordance and has been used bymany unconnected groups. Groups as diverse as the prehistoric populations of France,
ancient Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans all used under- or overlines in their writing
systems for various semaphoric purposes. The underline could owe its ubiquity to its
simplicity: a line can be inscribed with a wide variety of tools including flint, reed, stylus,
pencil, pen and ink, etc., and forms a combinative element of many writing systems. In
fact, to be able to write Latin, Greek, Etruscan, Egyptian, or Sumerian, you must first beable to form a line; writing a letter such as “H” requires at a minimum two vertical lines
and one horizontal line. While not every language system adopted the underline, any ofthem could have, so it is no surprise that is has been used as a component of many
languages and with multiple different meanings. However, despite this variation in usage,
there is a common thread: the underline is used to tie together pieces of writing. The
underlining writer intends to signal to the reader that the text indicated is related in someway, thus overloading the text with additional layers of meaning, some of which will be

10discussed below. The many uses of the underline in the millennia before the computer
revolution have lodged it in our consciousness in a way that makes its use to indicate thehyperlink very natural.

Ancient History
In some contexts, the underline and overline are used interchangeably, andsometimes in conjunction: in Roman inscriptions, for instance. While one or the other isusually preferred in a given domain of usage, it is not uncommon to see them usedinterchangeably, as with the vinculum in mathematics. Within a given language orcontext where both the underline and overline are used, they do not tend to have distinct
meanings. Presumably, this is due to the confusion this would cause in running text–isthat an overline for this line of text or an underline for the previous? Therefore, in thissection I will consider both types of lines as serving generally the same function, and mayrefer to them collectively as vincula, which speaks to their most common purpose.
The meaning of the word vinculum will help elucidate its history and meaning in
the history of the use of the under/overline in writing. The word derives from Latin, and“comes from the family of words round the verb sincere, meaning ‘to bind’. A vinculum
is anything with which binding is done. Hence, a fetter, bond, chain or rope” (Birks andDescheemaeker 3). The term was also used in other contexts such as the Latin legal
phrase “vinculum iuris” meaning “bond of law” referring to the important legal principleof obligations; a vinculum to a Roman was a critical and vital tie between entities, bethey legal or textual. This definition describes very well the usage of the under- or

11overline as an agglomerator, collecting entities together to form a whole, allowing it to be
ascribed meaning beyond the content: a function that is a durable trait of the vinculum.
In mathematics, the vinculum has two main usages. First, it can refer to the line
over or under a portion of a mathematical expression which indicates repeating decimals.
For instance, five twelfths (5/12) can be represented in decimal notation as 0.416 showingthat the six digit repeats ad infinitum. This tool is used to achieve precise rendering of an
expression while negating the need to use an approximation. The “bar” (which cancontain multiple digits) serves two roles: first, it ties the numbers within together as agroup, and second indicates that the group repeats forever. The vinculum here acts as an
infinitely recursive function, taking a set of integers as an input and outputting a string
endlessly repeating them. The other use of the vinculum is to group expressions in amanner similar to parentheses, affecting the order of operations of an equation. As in therecursive use, the bar, first and foremost, groups a set together.
The earliest documentation that I have found of the line being used in the capacityof the vinculum dates to an artifact from the Magdalenian era found in what is now
Brassempouy, France. The artifact consists of an antler which was carved with a series ofparallel lines. The lines are grouped into a series of divisions and separated by aperpendicular line (Ifrah 62). The perpendicular lines are thought to group the othermarks together and represent an early use of tally marks. This usage presages “five-bargate” system of marking off counts in groups of five: four verticals and a fifth horizontal
to complete the grouping. This system allowed pre- or semi-numerate cultures to record
quantities without the need for a robust system of number words or symbols (Ifrah 7).
That the system is still in use today attests to its intuitiveness and usefulness, possibly due

12
to its human factors: five being the number of digits to a hand and also the outer bound of
items able to be immediately quantified by sight without counting (Ifrah 7). The
horizontal line functions as a vinculum by tying the first four digits (a hand) into an easily
recognizable unit.
The vinculum was also used in Pharaonic Egypt and the Hittite Empire in theirhieroglyphic writing systems. The hieroglyphic system used pictographic representationsof objects and actions to document the world. Over time, shortcuts were taken to makefor more concise and convenient writing, and representational images became more
stylized. Plural words were indicated by a triplication of a given hieroglyph or by
drawing three horizontal lines over a pictograph (Ifrah 94). Here, again, the lines act asfunction, multiplying the meaning of the symbols contained within. While the meaning ismore literal and less symbolic than later uses of vincula, it is still a device apart from thelanguage, even if it cannot be directly connected to later uses of the device.
The Greek language represents the solid beginning of the Western use of thevinculum, from which a straight line can be drawn to our current usage. The written
number system of the first century BCE Greeks was acrophonic, representing numbers inwriting by using the first letter of the number’s name. For instance, the number five was“pente” (romanized) and was therefore represented by the Greek letter Pi (Π) (Ifrah 182).
This system overloaded the alphabet with a second set of meaning, numerical in nature.
While this overloading formed a convenient mnemonic device to aid comprehension, it
did so at the expense of clarity in written documents. Because the same glyphs were used
for numbers and letters (and since the language had not yet adopted the use of spacing
between words) parsing a string of characters into the correct words was potentially13
recondite. One could imagine the predisposition to “garden path sentences” this system
must have caused. The Greeks eventually adopted a system of representing numbers
sequentially in the order of the alphabet (A=1, B=2, Γ=3, etc.): if you knew your ABC’s,
you could count. This system—which survives to present day in the form of Greek
ordinals–had its advantages, but did not ameliorate the overloading issue (Ifrah 219). To
solve that, the Greeks used the vinculum to signal to a reader that the under/overlined
characters should be parsed numerically. This innovation can be found in extant
inscriptions and documents, and greatly increases the readability of a text, without theneed for a separate series of glyphs solely for numbers. Again, the vinculum ties theunderset letters off as a group, imputing additional meaning to this group.
Other contemporary cultures developed an alternate method of representing
numerals by using a separate glyph set. From a semiotic standpoint, the Greeks chose asystem of in-band signalling: using the existing medium of their alphabet to express
numbers transposed by the vinculum. Asian languages such as Japanese and Chinese
used the out-of-band signaling approach by employing a totally different glyph set(medium) for their numbers1 (Ifrah, Chapter 21) resulting in an implicit unambiguity of
number writing. Despite alternatives, the Greek system formed the basis of Western
numerical writing for centuries, perpetuating the need for continued use of the vinculum.
As in many areas of their culture, the Romans adopted the Greek system ofoverloading alphabetic characters with numerical meaning. In fact, they used thevinculum in at least two different manners, both numeric. First, the vinculum was

1. Approached from the perspective of McLuhanism, this raises the question of whether there is anappreciable difference in the reception of numbers in a language which uses the in- versus out-of-band
signaling technique. Are the meanings of numbers shaped by their alphabetic pronunciation?

14
employed in the same manner as the Greeks to indicated numbers in running text from atleast the first and second century BCE (Keppie 48). The Roman numeral system derived
separately from the Greeks, and is thought to derive from the Etruscan number system.
The numeral forms merged with Roman letters which shared visual similarity, resulting
in the system that is now familiar to us through chapter headings and grandfather clocks–
I,V,X,M, etc. (Ifrah 187). The Roman numerals were essentially homographs of theiralphabetic counterparts. While the letters chosen differ from the Greek, the property ofoverloading is the same. In fact, the Romans would also use the vinculum when quoting
Greek sources within an inscription, such as on the Library of Celsus while recording the
career of Celsus (Keppie 75). This alphabetic parsimony had both disadvantages andadvantages, as we will see at the beginning of the typewriter age when certain keys areused to represent multiple characters (e.g. lowercase “L” for the numeral one, and capital“O” for zero). The Romans were also creative in their use of the vinculum, not only
offsetting whole integers, but abbreviating words where they could. Roman epigraphy
reveals examples such as duumvir and triumvir (a political body of two and three leaders
respectively) to be shortened to IIVIR and IIIVIR , the two (II) and three (III) standing infor the trium- and duum- prefixes (Ifrah, 198-199).
Roman use of the vinculum survives on many inscriptions on monuments,
buildings, and documents, and influenced scholars of the middle ages in many ways, notthe least of which is the orthography of inscribed Latin, which survives to the present as
our serifed capital letters. Educated scribes and religious authors of the middle ages
exulted Roman culture as a pinnacle to strive towards and adopted many of the quirks
from the ancients. In Roman usage, the vinculum itself was overloaded with meaning.

15
Besides its use to set off numbers in running text, Romans used vincula in some contexts
to indicate multiplication of integers. Most common was the usage as a thousand
multiplyer: for instance, in the context of a mathematical tract,

would equal six

thousand with VI representing six and the overline multiplying it by one thousand. The
bar also had other multiplicative uses. In the context of currency, the symbol for thedenomination denarius, X, represented the currency unit was derived from its valuationof ten of its constituency currency, asses (Keppie 21). There is some debate over theprevalence of the vinculum as a thousand multiplicand due to that fact that much of theevidence of its use comes from transcriptions of documents made in the medieval period,
which I will discuss next. Ifrah believes that the thousand multiplicand vinculum was incurrency by the first century CE (198). He also cites as evidence from the early second
century CE an inscription from Ephesus (in turn, cited from Cagnat 1899) that a
vinculum-like character was used for myriad (10,000) multiplication. This character
differed from a vinculum by having ends that turned down to a greater or lesser extent
over the ends of the numeral (Ifrah 199). The multiplicative meaning was firmly in usage
in the Middle Ages and found in mathematical tracts (Ifrah 194). Like the contemporary
mathematical usage, these vincula and vinculoids act as functions on their inputs tomediate their meaning in a concise, albeit potentially confusing manner.
It is worth noting that the vinculum is not the only solution to disambiguating an
overloaded numerical medium, and sharing common linguistic roots is not deterministicof how numerical signifying is achieved. The Hebrew language–which also derives fromthe same Phoenician roots as Latin (Ifrah 212)–also used alphabetic glyphs to represent
numbers. But, rather than choosing an under- or overline, Hebrew uses a stroke at the top

16
corner of the last letter of a string of digits to indicate numbers in running text.
Conversely, the Coptic number system derived from hybrid Greek-Egyptian roots andused letter-numbers for small values and vincula for numbers over one thousand (Ifrah
224). As stated earlier, pictographically-derived languages were more oriented towards
the visual meaning of glyphs and tended to develop separate glyphs for numbers2.
Despite these alternatives, the Greco-Roman system survived as the dominant numericalparadigm in the Western world until the adoption of Indo-Arabic numerals.

Paper Systems
The term information system likely brings to mind a computerized solution toorganizing data, but information systems have existed for centuries. The first systems thatwould satisfy our modern definition used paper as their medium and the index card form
factor, specifically, was instrumental in allowing for the efficient manipulation of data.
The use of the index card to organize information is a relatively modern invention. Swiss
naturalist Conrad Gessner proposed in 1548 a system of “slips of papers for bibliographic
records” made “by writing down the entries on sheets of paper, underlining or writing in
capitals the catchword, and cutting up the sheets into slips that could then either be pasted
down in the required order” (Hopkins 384). While this early use of cards was intended as
an interim process for creating a more permanent bound work, it shows the rudiments of
the reference-based card system existed in the 16th century. Gessner’s system waspossibly the earliest example of hypertext-like information system using underlines to

2. Although these systems themselves tended to be overloaded with phonetic utility separate fromtheir ideographic meaning, the initial sound of an existing pictogram being used to “spell out” a concept
with no symbol of its own.

17
represent hyperlinks. A similar system was used specifically for library cataloguing byGottfried Wilhelm Leibniz as Librarian of Wolfenbüttel between 1691 and 1699. He used
slips of paper with title, author, and shelf location written on them to summarize thelibrary’s holdings, departing from the standard topic-based shelving system (Krajewski22). The first true library catalogue system was the Josephinian catalog begun in Austria
in 1780 as a result of an edict issued by Pope Clement XIV dissolving the Jesuit order. Its
libraries were then expropriated by the Vienna Court Library which required a system toorganize its newfound holdings (Krajewski 36–39). These innovations over centuries set
the stage for the government card catalog produced by the post-revolutionary Frenchgovernment, using the playing card as a medium of recording books. The impetus for thiscatalog was the dissolution of the confiscation of their books by the state libraries(Krajewski 46). These library systems represented an early approach to what David
Weinberger, in Everything is Miscellaneous, calls a second order organization–the itemsin the collection being the first order (17). By separating the thing itself from a reference
to the thing, metadata was freed from the constraints of the physical realities of thebookshelf and knowledge could be organized in new and efficient ways. The card itself
catalog itself is a type of hypertext, with cards acting (metaphorically) as hyperlinks tothe books they represent, and also as links to other cards/books through the use of crossreferences, the user of which flourished as card catalogs became standard practice inlibraries across the world.
Melvil Dewey, motivated by a reformist spirit, is best known for his invention of
the Dewey Decimal System, which sought to ease the organization of libraries bydividing the entire breadth of human knowledge into ten categories, and recursively

18
subdividing each of those categories into ten more (Wiegand 22). He aggressively
advocated for his system through his various commercial enterprises and it was
ultimately adopted by libraries throughout the country. Dewey was also was involved in
the standardization of the dimensions of the card catalog and the distribution of related
card-based technologies through the American Library Journal which he controlled(Wiegand 53). While best remembered for his library-related endeavors, hiscommercially oriented products were also widely adopted (Wright 41). In his influential
book about library science practice, Library School Rules, Dewey prescribed a series ofmarks (which he called “checks”) to be made on catalog cards to highlight salient
information (4). These checks consisted primarily of underlines and double underlines,
but also included miniature brackets and were used to highlight the author or topic which
the book is indexed by (22-32). The library community widely adopted this manner ofusage of the underline.
The card catalog served both as an antecedent to and inspiration for digital
hypermedia systems, as it shares many of its principles. The topic or author is underlined
to indicate that the datum is salient and that relevant content exists elsewhere in the
corpus. As Krajewski describes in Paper Machines, a book in which he draws parallels
between library card-based systems and digital computers (going so far as to describe
them as turing-complete), “cross-references are the crucial feature of a network” and thecross-references on library cards, frequently indicated by an underline, act as a hyperlink;
just like on the web, "on the basis of keywords and short forms, every point of the index
card box can refer precisely to another" (64). The use of the underline in this context both19
continues its traditional usage and also forms a bridge to its future use in digital hypertext
systems. This is especially true with the adoption of the typewriter to create these cards.

The Typewriter
The typewriter was the first practical invention that had the potential to replace
the pen or pencil as the dominant means of writing letters. Many early users of thetypewriter were amazed at its ability to replicate the look of printed material–theinvention of which preceded the typewriter by over 350 years–while allowing the user towrite faster than using script. While there were many false starts in its developments(many of which are described by Michael H. Adler in his book The Writing Machine), by
the end of the 19th century, the typewriter had become a ubiquitous office feature. For
primarily technical reasons, the prevalence of the typewriter resulted in the underline’s
use in far more situations than it ever had been previously.
Many inventors toiled to succeed at the common dream of constructing a device
which would allow a user to create one-off documents resembling a printed page, the firstpatent for such a device being granted in 1714 to Henry Mill in England (Current 23).
Like most new technologies, the list of progenitors to what we would consider the “final”
product is long. This process, well explained in George Basalla’s The Evolution ofTechnology, makes it difficult to fix the exact birth of what we consider to be thetypewriter. Many early inventions could produce type on a page, but due to various
mechanical limitations were impractical for widespread adoption. A common limitation
was the relatively small number of characters allowed by that many early devices,
constrained by the complexity of space and physical linkages. For example, the crude20
Sholes typewriter of 1843 did not contain numerals, necessitating the spelling out of
numbers or, more expediently, utilizing Roman numerals (Current 25). This centuries-old
numeral system became useful again for exactly the reason that the vinculum waspreviously needed: the overloading of a limited character set with additional meaning.
Whereas it was a potential disadvantage in Roman writing, it was used expeditiously inthis new mechanical circumstance.
Despite the many claimants and a long history of similar inventions, Richard N.
Current in his book, The Typewriter, makes a convincing case that Christopher Latham
Sholes’s invention of 1872 was the first device to contain all of the critical elements ofthe modern typewriter, allowing it to become commercially successfully. These
innovations include the auto-advancing platen, end-of-line bell, and QWERTY keyboard
layout (Current, 50-55). Like modern typewriters, this device used a series of keys toeffect the impression of inked metal onto a sheet of paper, thus approximating the effectof movable-type printing, the dominant mode of textual reproduction in the westernworld since the fifteenth century. However, the typewriter varies from printing in at least
two critical ways. First, the typewriter (until innovations by IBM in the mid-twentiethcentury) used monospaced fonts, meaning that each letter, number or symbol was spaced
at an even width. Secondly, each typewriter was physically limited in the number ofcharacters available to type. Each of these differences has an important influence in thedevelopment of the underline, and a direct relation to the early computer age. This
limitations of a small character set continued on many early computer systems, althoughfor different technological reasons.

21
Monospace type is more convenient to engineer on a typewriter because theescapement which advances the platen is only required to move a fixed distance for eachkey press.3 Whereas letterpress systems allow type of any width and variable kerning
through physical means, typewriters required even spacing with characters often renderedin ways which filled up more space (e.g. “i” rather than “i”). This monospace system
negated the traditional advantage of the italic in letterpress printing, which is the ability
to set text more closely without reducing legibility by lowering point size, an innovation
generally attributed (for instance, by the Encyclopædia Britannica) to Aldus Manutius in
his printing of Virgil around 1500 (“italic”). Therefore, the typewriter removed one of thecommon modes of setting off sections of running text in print. Boldface, or blackletter
type, was also absent in the limited character sets of early typewriters, although afacsimile could be produced by repeatedly overtyping a letter. The underline, however,
was not impeded by this monospace limitation.
An even more important difference from typesetting was the limited number ofcharacters available on a given typewriter. The movable-type printer was only limited by
the number pieces of type owned by the printer–and even then, woodcuts could be
produced to fill in any gaps in metal type. The relationship between the available
character set and mechanical complexity of early typewriters was somewhat linear: morecharacters yielded a proportionally greater number of moving parts. With each character
inclusion precious, much thought was given to which characters were omitted, and whichwere critical or could be overloaded with meaning. Sholes’ 1872 typewriter had only

3. Many typewriters of this era used a spring-loaded carriage, holding the type, which travelledacross the the page letter-space by letter-space by means of a gear called an escapement. The piece of paper
was held still on a support called a platen.

22
numbers, a few punctuations marks, and letters which lacked the ability to shift between
the cases–which would be invented in 1878. This limitation inspired Sholes’ business
partner, James Densmore to conceive of a special underline character—or combination
bracket-underline—to indicate that the character was to be interpreted as uppercase(Current 38). This usage harkens back to the Roman vinculum in that it overloaded acharacter set with additional meaning, and is an early example of the underline as
typewriter feature, even conceptually. This device also eschewed separate keys for thenumerals “0” and “1,” as they could be plausibly rendered by the “O” and “l” (lowercase“L”) keys, respectively (Wershler-Henry 154). These examples illustrate how themechanical limitations of the machine shaped the visual design of the documents they
produced, a theme that will recur in the nascent stages of the development of hypertext.
The underscore key on the typewriter was a fixture of the keyboard by 1881,
documented as a character on the “Caligraph” typewriter developed by George
Washington Newton Yost (Adler 176). Underlining was achieved by backing the carriage
up one space, then typing over the intended character with an underscore. The underscore
was set below the baseline of the regular type and would thus form an underline. Because
each character was monospaced, the underscores were connected, forming a continuousline. This scheme was to be used on subsequent typewriters and, as we will see, shaped
telegraphic standards.
These two limitations explain why the underline quickly became an importantfeature on typewriters whereas it was not on the printing press: underlining was the only
available form of accentuation of text available on the typewriter. A printer had multiple
tools at his disposal to set off text; he could use a larger font size, italic type, stronger

23
type, blackletter type such as fraktur, SMALL CAPS, or any manner of ornament or
wingding–the manicule, “ ”, was frequently used for this purpose (Houston 172). Since
each character was chosen from a typecase and inserted individually, no continuity
between characters in a set was required. These variants were used frequently, and withmany different meanings varying according to geography, subject, and time period. The
other dominant mode of written communication, handwriting, also has its many modes of
expressiveness and is even less constrained than the printing press with its ability toshape each letterform differently, switch between hands, or add extraliterary annotations
such as curlicues, doodles, or marginalia.
None of these tools were available on early typewriters, but the need to produce
an expressive document had not changed. To fill this role, the underline was a convenientsurrogate. Adding but one more key allowed any other character on the machine to bemodified, in a way doubling the combinative glyphs available. In practice though, theunderline is more useful when deployed on the word- or sentence-level. The underline
was used in many capacities, encapsulating the use cases of the previously described
letterpress variants. The underline was used to give emphasis to a word or phrase by
drawing the eye to it, either because of the additional visual of the printing, the Gestalt
law of grouping, or the dissimilarity from the text around it. This principle is also used togreat effect on the web, where best-practice advice, backed up by eye tracking researchby Nielsen, et al. shows that the eyes saccade between underlined links on a page4(Eyetracking Web Usability 144).

4. This raises the question of whether we are primed to look for underlined text due to its
conventional use to demarcate important content or an innate psychophysical predilection for the underline.
A possible, although likely difficult to execute experiment, would be to test the ability of an underlined

24
The typewriter also fostered the use of the underline to represent what would
traditionally be represented with italics, for instance titles of books. The Chicago Manualof Style, which was first printed in 1906, has been consistent in its use of italics for booktitles, however, by the 1982 (13th) edition, in recognition of the common use of
typewriters it issued advice on best practices of using the underline to indicate emphasis(Chicago Manual of Style, various editions). So while formal contexts that called fortypesetting still preferred other forms of emphasis, the underline flourished as a signifierin the typewriter-dominated world. In this regard, the underlines function as a link orreference to the book in question, a very hypermedia-like approach. If the world of books
is envisioned as a network domain, the books are nodes and references between them
function as edges forming a web-like structure. The use of the underline representing
titles presages the web’s hyperlinks. The specific layout of the typewriter keyboard
proved instrumental in shaping the telegraphic and eventual computational future ofcharacter sets.

Telegraphy
Like the typewriter, the telegraph has a long and incremental history, all of which
is described amply elsewhere. Over time, it reshaped the world’s communications
paradigm, allowing near instantaneous communication over hitherto unprecedented
distances. For the telegraphic incunabula, communications companies desired a way toautomate and simplify the operations of the telegraph and remove the need for an
operator to cipher and decipher the code (generally Morse code), which formed anphrase to attract visual attention among a population which has not traditionally used underlining it its
writing system.

25
expense as well as a bottleneck as transmission speeds increased. There was an overlap
between typewriter development and this quest: Christopher Latham Sholes showed his
nascent typewriter to inventor Thomas Edison in 1870 (Wershler-Henry 69), but Edison
was unimpressed with this crude machine, convinced a device of his own creation would
be superior. Ultimately, Edison did not create a successful typewriter, but instead his
invention became the stock ticker (Adler 32). Other inventors did have more successmerging the typewriter telegraph and and allowing telegraphic code to be directly
converted into the written word. The first widespread standard for this was patented by
Frenchman Jean-Maurice-Émile Baudot in 1874; his system used a series of five binary
digits–allowing up to 32 combinations–to represent the alphabet in a machinedecipherable format. A shift code allowed this set to be be expanded with another 32
symbols such as numerals and punctuation (Fischer 1). This original character set had nofacility to represent formatting of any kind, as its purpose was just to convey terse
messages. This sufficed until the dawn of the computer era when, just as happened withthe typewriter, the desire for a more expressive character set put pressure on standardsmakers to expand the available symbols.
As telegraphic hardware began to be used to interact with automated andeventually computerized machinery there was a push to expand the telegraphic characterset. No longer was a human the only ingester of telegraphically transmitted data. For
example, the Murray Printing Telegraph patented by Donald Murray in 1899 used a fivebit code similar to Baudot’s to print Roman alphabetic characters from a punched tape.
His code allowed extra shift codes to further expand the number of expressible characters(Fischer 3). The various competing code standards posed a problem for international

26
communications organizations; without a standard code, devices could not communicate
intelligibly. The differing alphabetic requirements of the various languages exacerbatedthis Tower of Babel scenario. The Comité Consultatif International des Communications
Télégraphiques (CCIT) met in 1926 to hash out a global standard telegraphic character
set (Fischer 6). The resultant International Telegraph Alphabet No. 1 and successful
Alphabet No. 2 remained in use until the mid 1950s, at and which point digital computing
required a more advanced character set. In 1963, ASCII code was approved, expandingon an early internal code used by IBM; ASCII contained letters, numerals, symbols, andcontrol characters, but was still very basic and akin to early telegraphic code. However,this code was the basis for the first code that included the underscore character (Fischer
21).
The successor to the CCIT, the International Telegraph and Telephone
Consultative Committee (CCITT), used ASCII as the basis for its own proposed standard,
which was more internationally focused than ASCII. Included in the CCITT standard is
the underscore character as well as combining diacritics: characters that would be added
to other characters to change their meaning (Fischer 24). For example “A” would be sentas as string of three signals “A”, backspace,“_”, which would print an “A,” back thewritehead up one space, then overtype with an underscore, then advance once again. Thissame principle was used for accented characters, e.g. “é” would be sent as “e,”backspace, “´”. Other combining characters included tilde (~) and circumflex (^). Thissystem allowed for a reduced number of characters in the set without limiting the ability
to produce variants. These changes ultimately made their way back into ASCII in 1967
and were heavily used in the development of computer systems (Fischer 28). The use of

27“combining diacritical marks” presages the invention of the Unicode character standard
decades later which vastly expanded the characters available to computer software
allowing for the incorporation of non-Roman alphabets and characters sets, as well as
special purpose symbols. Unicode uses the more efficient method of storing diacritics as
separate character entities; this is especially important in languages which make heavy
use to diacritics in constructing their letters (“The Unicode Standard Version 8.0 – Core
Specification."). Unicode, which is now used on all modern operating systems, also
includes a combining underline which functions in the same manner as the diacritic.
This section has demonstrated that the underline has existed through the majorityof written human history, from early clay tablets to tablet computers. Its usage has variedin the specifics, but has always been a tool to tie content together and give it extra
meaning. The next section will discuss the various way that links have been represented
in hypermedia, including but not limited to the underlining, which will give insight into
its use on the web.

Visual Representations of Hyperlinks Before the Web

As the first part of this chapter demonstrated, the desire and need to crosslink
knowledge was felt long before the invention of the modern computer, especially as
exacerbated by the flood of books produced after the commercialization of the moveabletype printing press. Publishers attempted to aid readers in navigating this sea ofknowledge with the development of reference works with organizational tools such as
outlines and indices between the 16th and 18th centuries (A. Wright 23). The underline

28
was used in many different contexts, but was frequently used to show a linkage. Many
methods of constructing linkages were concocted and many means of indicating thoselinkages were tested. Card catalogues attempted to order the world of knowledge andused underlined index words to indicate to a user that more information existed on a topic
and created a web-like structure. However, these systems were limited by human factors
such as retrieval speed or physical space requirements. Also, systems tended to index
only like content (e.g. books in a library, or a business inventory). While these systems
were important innovations, the pace of knowledge creation did not wane, and new
systems for cross referencing a broader range of knowledge were increasingly in demand.
This section will discuss the history of hypertext leading up to the invention of theweb, specifically focused on the visual representation of the hyperlink in these systems.
Next, it will show that many methods of highlighting links were used and that theunderline was not the only or obvious choice for Tim Berner-Lee based on extant
systems, and that the factors leading to the use of hyperlink signifiers were strongly
influenced by the affordances of the computer environments in which the systems weredeveloped. The determinism of hardware reflects the findings of the first part of thischapter which showed that many systems used the underline for reasons that were more
technical than aesthetic or philosophical. This chapter ends with the invention of the web
because it very quickly became the dominant global hypertext system.
Choosing a place to begin is non-trivial: there are many contenders to the first
hypertext system. As George Basalla demonstrates in The Evolution of Technology bydrawing a metaphor between Darwinian evolution in living organisms and theprogression of artifacts that result in our current technologies, upon close inspection,

29
technological change generally happens not through well documented “inventions,” butincrementally and without fanfare over the course of time. The well known inflection
points of history look much smoother under a microscope. But a choice must be made. I
will begin with Vannevar Bush’s Memex, but there are other claimants to the title of first
hypertext system. Alex Wright argues in his book, Cataloging the World: Paul Otlet andthe Birth of the Information Age, that the eponymous Belgian librarian was the progenitor
of hypertext systems. He cites for evidence Otlet’s 1934 proposal for a system of“electronic telescopes” to allow “people to search through millions of interlinked
documents, images, and audio and video files...” using “desktop workstations — eachequipped with a viewing screen and multiple movable surfaces— connected to a central
repository which would provide access to a wide range of resources” which he called"réseau mondial” or global network (Wright 8). Adding weight to Wright’s argument for
Otlet over Bush is the observation that Otlet’s 1934 proposal was predicated on
networked systems whereas Bush envisioned solitary workstations (Wright 257).
However, Otlet’s system was theoretical: he did not propose the specifics of its
implementations and also his work was not widely disseminated due to the Nazi invasionof Belgium in 1940 and the destruction of confiscation of much of the Belgian librarysystem (Wright 12). Perhaps most relevant to this study, Otlet was not explicit in thedetails of the user-interface of his system. Wright also puts forth Emanuel Goldberg, theinventor of many microfilm technologies, as a possible contender, and in fact Goldberg’s
patent for an optical retrieval system based on microfilm technology was seen by
Vannevar Bush and its prior art prevented Bush from patenting his Memex concept(Wright 208). However, Goldberg did not widely publish his vision or make a great

30
impact with his device, so his is more of an interesting footnote. As a result of the very
wide publication of his concept and the explicit explanation of its user interface, Bush’s
Memex is the best starting point for a discussion of the visual representation of thehyperlink in the digital era.

The Memex
With the growth up publication unabated in the years in the years leading up to
the Second Word War, the pressing need to develop new organizational systems led tothe seminal publication of the essay “As We May Think” in 1945 by Vannevar Bush,
American engineer and military research and development administrator. He made theobservation that it was becoming impossible for scientists to keep themselves aware of all
new research being published and to organize their notes and resources (Bush). Comingfrom a background in computer science, Bush proposed a hypothetical system called the“Memex” which would allow media of all types to be ingested, stored on microfilm, andeasily retrieved on a screen by the user. Critically, the system would allow “associativeindexing” using links or “trails” to be defined between any pieces of content by the user,
in a manner similar to how our own brains connect memories. Such a system, he asserted,
could increase the efficiency of the user to organize and retrieve his thoughts about andconnections between content. This system is cited as the first description of what would
become known as “hypertext” (Bardini 39).
In his essay, Bush describes how the Memex could function by extrapolating fromcontemporary technological developments, especially the then-astonishing storage
capacity of microfilm. The navigation of user-defined links would have been effected31
through the use of buttons and levers under a screen on a desk, presaging later computer
terminals, if not the visual implementation of later hypermedia systems. The links would
have been stored in a machine-readable format on the microfilm and presented as a list to
the user on a per-page basis, instead of a per-word or per-arbitrary-section basis as inlater systems. Despite differences in the visual representation of hyperlinks, the germinal
concepts of the web were contained in Bush’s essay. While it would be decades before
the computer technology existed to attempt to implement a system as complex as theMemex, computer research accelerated with the invention of the integrated circuit,allowing hitherto inconceivable complexity to be achieved. Bush’s writings were
especially prescient as he wrote before transistors were even commercially available andbefore Gordon Moore described the exponential growth pattern of processing power(Hiltzik 89). The importance of the Memex was not technological–it was based on
existing technologies, and then only discussed in generalities–but in bringing the idea ofhypertext to a wide audience. It would be for later inventors to figure out how to make itwork, and how to address the presentational challenges raised by the conceptual
underpinnings of hypertext.

The Typewriter, Part II
Bush’s grandiose vision of the Memex and concrete realities of hardware took
many years to bridge but in the meantime, technology did advance, with exponential
growth in transistorized computer processing and memory, perhaps outstripping
innovation in interface technology. Existing technology was adapted to the needs ofinnovation, and, of particular relevance to this study, was the incorporation of the32
typewriter as a computer peripheral to fill the needs of input and output (I/O) on rapidly
improving computers. Developed as business machines, many computers in the 1950s
and 1960s used a modified typewriter for I/O, replacing earlier systems that used punch
cards and tape. IBM’s very popular typewriter models 2740 and 2741, released in 1965,
were based on the IBM electric typewriter with additional computer controlled actuators.
The sensors, actuators and electronics added to the machine allowed the devices tofunction either as typewriters or as “computer-controlled interactive terminals… in timesharing applications” (Pugh 581). This meant that multiple users would submit
commands via their terminals to a remote mainframe computer, which shared its
processing power among all of them, frequently resulting in slow response times. In asense, the time-sharing configuration was a cross between telegraph and a computer, andas previously mentioned, the interplay between the typewriter, telegraph, and computerinfluenced the character code standard, ASCII.
During the development of the ASCII standard computer, programmers weighedin on character inclusions that would benefit and ease the use of their language of choice
and its peculiarities. For instance, programmers of the ALGOL language pushed forinclusion of arrow symbols in the new standard because that was traditionally how
certain functions were represented in that language (Fischer 14). The IBM printing
terminal, based on the Selectric line, was especially well suited to printing alternative
character sets because of its interchangeable type ball (Pugh 366). Also known as a “golfball,” the type for the machine was molded onto the periphery of a sphere connected to
the keys by a complex series of linkages. Unlike traditional typewriters with an arm foreach pair of letters, the typeball system allowed the type set to be easily changed by33
swapping out the ball itself (Nicolson 1). Despite some flexibility with switching a
typeball, these machines were still limited to a finite number of available characters (88or 96 in IBM’s case) and no formatting to speak of, other than the use of the backspaceunderscore form of underlining (GP IBM Selectric Typeball Catalog).
The typewriter was drafted to serve as the input-option layer of early computers
because it was readily-available, easily interfaced with and adapted to the needs of digitalcomputers, and comfortable and familiar to office users. However, the influence between
the machines was bidirectional: the physical constraints of the typewriter shaped thetypes of hardware built and programs written by engineers. And while the typewriter was
not an optimal interface device (for instance, forcing computer programs to keep track ofshift cases and line lengths) it was a convenient device and allowed computer developers
to more quickly innovate by using the computational hardware. This pattern repeats again
and again, including in the development of the web: aesthetic and user-interface factors
are often subordinated to the inclination to use hardware defaults.

Early Hypertext Systems
Vannevar Bush’s 1945 essay described both a piece of hardware and vision of afunctionally-infinite stockpile of documents which could be arbitrarily linked to one
another. Bush termed the hardware the Memex, but the organizational concept lacked aname until 1962 when Ted Nelson coined hypertext (Bardini 39). Hypertext, according to
Nelson, referred to non-linear text which could be freely navigated by a user, and formed
the basis of a system Nelson envisioned called Xanadu, similar in many ways to theMemex (Barnet 4). Though Xanadu was not built, Nelson was involved in one of the

34seminal projects in early hypertext, the Hypertext Editing System (HES). The term
hypertext, and the related hyperlink and hypermedia, are foundational to the study of allmanners of related systems which can store and navigate information. The terms unify
systems based on disparate technology (microfilm, digital computing, even–as Markus
Krajewski argues–paper) into one field of study, and will provide a lens to investigate
many different systems up to and including the web. What follows is a summary of themost important hypertext systems and their salient innovations, both hardware andsoftware, which shaped the course of hypertext.
Before the mid-1960s, commercial computers, having grown out of businessneeds, were large, cumbersome, and used to execute programs as batches (Hiltzik, xxi).
By the mid-1960s, many computers still used batch processing–in which a program wasloaded and the computer allowed to work on the given problem until completion–but
interactive or “online” interaction was beginning to be used due to geometric increases in
the affordability of computing power and memory, as later described by Moore’s Law in1965 (Barnet 3). The IBM 360 system was a dominant player in the time-sharing market,
and despite not being the spiritual successor of Vannevar Bush’s Memex, was importantin the development of early hypertext systems. It could be equipped with a light pen–a
device which allowed the user to interact directly with the output display by using an
optic sensor to detect when the electron gun crossed the indicated spot on the cathode ray
tube. This interface gave the IBM 360 what Pugh described as the first “operator-display
interaction” (599). For the first time in a commercial system, a user could point directlyat the screen and effect an action on the indicated object, which is a very powerful
metaphor as most interactions in the world work this way. Most importantly to the history

35of hypertext, an IBM 360 system was used for the development of HES which also used alight pen for interaction. Developed at Brown University around 1967 by a team led byAndries Van Dam and involving Ted Nelson, “HES was the world's first word processor
to run on commercial equipment. It was also the first hypertext system that beginners
could use, and pioneered many modern hypertext concepts for personal use” (Barnet 3).
Making a physical connection with a target object is a much more intuitive metaphor thantyping an abstract command into a machine, relying on a frequently-arcane grammar. The
direct interaction technique of the hyperlink on the web (albeit through the mediation of
the mouse) can be seen as built on this type of metaphor.
Bush’s “As We May Think” also had a great impact on the work of Douglas
Engelbart, who cited Bush’s essay as his motivation to begin work on his revolutionary,Memex-like computer system (Hiltzik 62). Engelbart joined the Stanford ResearchInstitute (SRI) in 1957 to work on research computing projects. Stanford University of
Menlo Park, California spun off SRI in 1947 as a private, non-profit organization. Its
mission was to perform research and development projects in conjunction with business,academic, and governmental bodies, and while most of its staff’s time was spent working
on contracted research projects, Engelbart was primarily interested in developing a novel
interactive computer system (Bardini 14). Created in conjunction with Bill English, Dave
Hopper and Robert Bates, who all joined SRI around 1964, the new system was to be
known as NLS or “oN-Line System” (Bardini 120). The NLS was funded by ARPAIPTO, the federally-funded research arm of the Advanced Projects Research Agency for
Information Processing Techniques Office led by J. C. R. Licklider for whom Engelbart's
vision of creating a system to augment human intelligence resonated (Bardini 23).

36
Engelbart envisioned the NLS as being an interactive system based oncommercial hardware. While previous “personal computers” existed with an interactive,
real-time interface, they allowed all of the machine’s computer power to sit fallow until
the user issued a command. Other large computers were used for batch operations where
programs were run to completion sequentially. Instead, the NLS used a time-sharing
configuration to allow many users to interact with the computer simultaneously, and witha high degree of responsiveness, which was made possible by an operating system andhardware which would allow users to share the computer's processing resources andmemory using a technology called “memory paging” (Bardini 125). The innovations inmemory paging came from Scientific Data Systems (SDS), a company which also had
involvement in early hypertext systems.
SDS’s 940 computer, which ran an operating system developed by Project GENIE
at UC Berkeley, was chosen for Engelbart's interactive computer project because itsupported time-sharing and memory paging, facilitating the interactive environment
Engelbart envisioned (Bardini 123). The NLS software on the SDS 940 had two modes ofinteraction: teletype and “special delivery channel.” The teletype (in practice the Teletypemodel 33 and 37 were used) provided a much more limited level of interaction with thesystem. According to Bardini:
The teletype terminal, a distant offspring of research in type printing fortelegraphy, had been the standard interface for time-sharing systems since
the early 1960s. It was basically a typewriter transformed for telegraphy
input and printing. . . (127)However, the special delivery channel mode based on CRT technology was a
revolutionary new method in human computer interaction and allowed the interaction
techniques that have become pervasive today. In fact, in the forty years between its

37
demonstration and the rise of touch based-computers such as the iPhone, the mousekeyboard-screen combination was synonymous with personal computing.
Existing CRT technology used point-plotting or vector systems to convert
instructions from a computer to an image on the display. These systems were limited intheir ability to display graphics or complex imagery. However, more advanced systems
incorporating a frame buffer, which, while producing much better imagery, required agreat deal of memory, resulting in prohibitive costs (Bardini 131). To solve this problem,
Engelbart implemented a hybrid system, which used a CRT mated to a television camera
to convert the vector images to a scan-line signal compatible with normal televisionmonitors (Bardini 133). The CRTs were small, the hardware to run them was complex
and based on vacuum tube technology, and their output abilities were limited (Bardini132). Despite these limitations, the NLS allowed the combined use of imagery and text at
a reasonable cost and enabled SRI to present it in the first-of-its-kind video conferenced,
real-time presentation to the ACM/IEEE-Computer Society Fall Joint Computer
Conference in San Francisco, later dubbed the “Mother of all Demos,” in 1968 (Bardini138). SRI’s demonstration marked the first public display of the computer mouse and afunctional hypertext system. At the time, each one of these innovations could have
impressed a crowd, but demonstrating them all together was revolutionary. The longinfluence of this presentation can be seen in the current paradigm: every time one uses a
computer with a mouse and keyboard to navigate files or surf the web.
Besides the novel hardware solutions of the NLS, the system stands out most for
its software implementation of a hypertext system that can be seen as a progenitor of theweb. The NLS had many of the standard features of a text editor, but stored all text and38content in a series of “statements” which were structured hierarchically (Bardini 136).
Arbitrary links could be defined between statements using the “study” command and thennavigated using the mouse in an action termed “jumping.” This tool could be used tocreate a complex web of hyperlinks between any files in the system in a manner very
similar to Bush’s Memex (Barini 138). For the first time, hyperlinks were being
displayed on a screen and accessed by a mouse interface, although without the graphic
signifier that we have come to expect. The mouse worked more like a cursor in a normal
command-line based system, still requiring a command to be issued to cause action basedon its location. Hyperlinks between statements were displayed with a text-based tag
which could be hidden or shown on demand with a text command (Engelbart). The
hyperlink was not attached to a particular word or phrase, but to an entire statement (ofarbitrary length), and could either move the user progressively through a hierarchy or toan arbitrary, predefined point in any file. NLS demonstrated a novel, hybrid system ofhyperlink semiosis: keeping links invisible by default until invoked by a command, thenallowing direct selection via mouse.
The text mode of the NLS only expressed uppercase letters, and overlines wereused to indicate that letters should be interpreted as capitalized. This overlining does notseem to have been overloaded with meaning, for instance as a signifier of a hyperlink, butsince links were attached to statements generally rather than given words, this would nothave been considered. In displaying graphics, there is evidence that underlines were used,
but to provide emphasis only (Engelbart). While not the origin of the underline in
hypertext, the NLS was the first system to use many of the critical components of what

39
were considered the modern web-type interface, including the mouse, the hyperlink,embedded images, and real time interactivity.
The innovations of NLS had a long-lasting influence on the development of
personal computer interface technology and on hypermedia. Nearby to SRI, Xerox
established its own research and development group in 1970 called PARC (short for Palo
Alto Research Center). Xerox intended to compete in the burgeoning computer market
and hoped a West Coast branch could tap into the innovation of Silicon Valley. PARC
developed a number of important technologies, including the Ethernet networking
protocol and the laser printer, as well as advanced user interface technologies. Based offof the work of Douglas Engelbart, PARC created the Alto computer in 1972, which it
released in 1973 (Hiltzik 200). The Alto personal computer used a menu-based display
interface and was the first commercial computer to use a mouse. While not commerciallysuccessful, its software, especially the Bravo text editor, popularized the interaction
methods which would come to dominate the desktop computer space and would be vitalin the development of other mouse-based hypertext systems and eventually the web.
Most directly, the Alto (and it successor, the Star) influenced the design of Apple Inc.’s(Apple) Macintosh computer (Hiltzik 361).
The Macintosh, released by Apple under the control of Steve Jobs in 1984, was acommercial success unlike the Alto, taking many of the novel innovations of PARC andreducing their production price sufficiently to reach the personal computer market. WhileI will not dwell on the history of Apple, the Macintosh is important to the history of the
web and hypermedia for a few reasons. First, Macintosh popularized the directmanipulation paradigm that is the basis of web interaction (Gladwell). Second, one of the40most widely distributed hypertext programs, HyperCard, was developed on the
Macintosh, which I will discuss later. Finally, the Macintosh was the predecessor to the
NeXT Computer which was developed by NeXT, Inc., the company Steve Jobs createdafter leaving Apple. The NeXT Computer was instrumental to the creation of the web by
Tim Berners-Lee, to be discussed later.
The impact of the Macintosh on the graphical desktop market cannot be
understated, but it was also competing against less expensive computers, including theincredibly popular, but text-based IBM PC. The limitations and capabilities of the display
system of a computer have very important implications in the methods chosen to
represent interfaces and specifically hyperlinks. The choices made by designers of how to
implement a concept visually is as much based on how they can do it as much as how
they should do it. In the following section, I will illustrate the role of path dependency ofdisplay technology on the presentation of hypertext systems through an analysis of theaffordances of the various display adapters available around this time.

Display Adapters
A computer is useless if it cannot provide functional output to its user, but themethods of doing so have evolved significantly over the history of computing. Early
computers used punched card or tape, lights, or mechanical indicators to record output.
These were supplanted by teletype-based systems in the 1960s. Cathode ray tube (CRT)based systems were developed for specialty purposes but did not find widespread
adoption until the 1970s. For instance, the military-inspired projects such as Whirlwind at
MIT in the 1950s and SAGE used CRT displays in conjunction with a light pen to track41
user input, however the high cost of these systems were uneconomical for wider
application.
The expense of using CRTs did not stem from the tube itself, as they were readily
available from the TV industry. Instead, the expense was related to the memory andcontrol circuitry needed to operate them. The CRT operates by using a signal to modulate
an electron beam that scans along the phosphorus-coated screen. In television, the signal
is generated from a camera at the point of broadcast, and is fed from an optical input(from a live broadcast of a recording). Due to the limitations of human continuity ofvision and the limited time an unexcited phosphor will glow, the screen needs to be swept
multiple times every second–roughly 15 times per second in the NLS system–to produce
a flickerless image (Engelbart). This does not present a problem for TV, which has as
input a continuous signal from a broadcast, and does not need to buffer that input in any
way, just convert the signal to instructions for the electron gun. Conversely, a computer
has no implicit visual representation of its content; programs only issue output commands
sporadically. To replicate the action of a teletype input, simply instructing the CRT to
output a message once, would result on a barely perceptible flash on the screen. Instead,the message would need to be repeatedly output many times per second to produce acontinuous image, the task of which being so onerous that it would monopolize theprocessing power of computers at the time. To solve this problem, display buffers weredeveloped which would allow offloading the maintenance of CRT output from thecomputer itself.
In early screen-oriented computers, developers were forced to compromise
between competing needs due to the limitations of the existing technologies, resulting in42some sub-optimal decisions when appraised from an aesthetic standpoint. The special
challenge with using a CRT was the technical complexity of the buffer—the hardware
used to generate an image. There were two main approaches to output buffers: raster andtext-based. Raster outputs store a value for each pixel of the screen in memory. Thisrequires a number of bits for each pixel (this number is dependent on the number ofcolors available for each pixel), which was very costly in the early days of interactive
computing. For instance, on the NLS, the full pixel buffer that would be needed to assign
a color individually to each pixel would have cost $15,000 to $20,000, making it anunaffordable choice (Bardini 131). The advantage of such a system, called “bitmapped,”
however, was the program running on the computer would have complete control overevery pixel on the screen independently. A bitmapped display leaves all design choices tothe program designer, and their interface is much less beholden to the typefaces orgraphics modes of the hardware. The alternative was to use a text-based system which,instead of storing data for every pixel, stored a datum for each cell of a grid into which
the monitor was divided. Each cell could be filled with one of a predefined number ofcharacters, for instance the ASCII character set. The pixels to store these characters werestored in hardware and drawn as needed. This significantly lowered the memory needed
to store the current display in a buffer, but at the expense of expressiveness of visualdisplay. The choice, and subsequent limitations, of one or the other of these systems had
profound effects on the type of display systems and software developed on each system.
Also, within each display mode, the nuances of the character sets and options available
also constrained output. A developer, when presented with the choice between display
modes would choose the one which best served his needs and would have to accept the43tradeoffs entailed. What follows is a discussion of some the most influential display
adapters and an analysis of how their limitations affected the software and especially
hypertext systems developed on them.

ANSI Terminal/DEC VT100. Before desktop computing overtook timesharing as thedominant paradigm, terminals were used to interact with distant computers. Manystandards existed, but the Digital Equipment Corporation VT100 eventually gained
enough market share to become a de facto standard, and its code system was adopted byother manufacturers. The terminal used a set of commands called escape codes to allow
the computer to control the visual aspects of the textual display. These codes were
eventually consolidated as the Select Graphic Rendition section of Standard ECMA-48
which standardized control functions for coded character sets (ECMA 40). These codes
were invisible to terminal-users but instructed the terminal how to display the text thatwas to follow. These parameters included underline, italics, blinking, bold, and others.
While this standard grew out of the specific abilities of the VT100, it came to beincorporated in subsequent computer technologies such as the BASH shell, a commandline program used in UNIX and its clones and descendants–including Linux and AppleOSX (Loison). Interestingly, the ability for the VT100 to display the underline was not
adopted by many of the other display standards that replaced it. Being a monochrome
system with fixed-width fonts, the VT100 terminal did not require many bits per
character in a frame buffer, unlike the systems that followed, allowing a relatively moreadvanced capacity to format characters. It would take a number of years for these to be
standard on desktop computers, although the capabilities included in ECMA-48 would

44
shape early text-based browsers such as Lynx, which I will discuss in the following
chapter.

IBM Monochrome Display Adapter (MDA). The IBM PC, released in 1981, was an
immediate success among business users who were seeking inexpensive personal
computers. Unlike the Apple Macintosh, released in 1984, which used a graphic display,
the PC used a monochrome, text-based display. The display was 80 by 25 characters insize and supported 256 different characters codes in its 8 kilobyte character generator.
Each character box was 9 by 14 pixels, while the characters are represented in a grid of 7
by 9 pixels (IBM 1-123). This box to character ratio is indicative of the manners in whichcharacters can be modified. Each character on the display was represented in the display
adapter as a pair of two bytes: one byte (8 bits) for the character itself (of the 256
available), and one as an attribute code. Three bits each of the attribute code controlled
the display of the foreground and background of the character. One bit set the given
character to blink, and one bit set the intensity of the character. These codes could be
combined to hide the text, reverse the video or underline the text (IBM 1-126).
Two attributes of the design of the MDA allowed the possibility of using
underlining on the IBM PC: the use of a character box with sufficient spacing to fit
underline pixels, and the choice to reserve one bit of the attribute code dedicated torepresent the underline. Especially at the lower end of the personal computer market,
memory was at a premium and only a finite amount of metadata about each character
could be stored without adding more memory. Other methods of modifying text would
require other tradeoffs; adding italics could have been achieved by increasing the45
memory of the character generator, adding italic characters, and increasing the width ofthe character code. But whereas an underline is combinatory, italics would require an
entirely different character set and associated memory to store it. In many ways, the
MDA mimics the capabilities of desktop printers (in fact, the full name of the adapter is
the “IBM Monochrome Display and Printer Adapter”) and also controlled a printerattached via a parallel connector (IBM 1-117). Because of the lack of expressiveness inthe formatting characters on the IBM PC, engineers developed workarounds to ameliorate
the monotony of plain text in the form of “code page 437” which was the default
character set included in the graphic adapter. This series of characters included not only
the standard numbers, letters, and symbols that would be expected, but also a series ofbox-drawing characters (Microsoft). These could be combined to form single and doublewalled boxes when placed precisely around text and were used to create rudimentary
visual user-interface elements such as windows and buttons. By way of contrast, thebitmapped Macintosh used a character set which omitted box-drawing characters in favorof various symbols (Connolly 60). As a result, application designers on the IBM PC madeextensive use of these characters in their applications not necessarily because they were
optimal—the boxes allowed for at best ersatz visual user interfaces—but because they
were available.

IBM Color/Graphics Monitor Adapter (CGA). Unlike the MDA, which also controlled
printer output, the IBM Color/Graphics Monitor adapter was only meant to control video
output to a monitor or television set (IBM 1-133). The CGA had two modes of operation:
first, a text mode called A/N (alphanumeric) similar to the MDA. This mode supported a

46
40 by 25 grid or 80 by 25 grid (on high resolution monitors) with a box size of 8 by 8
pixels. Each character with a box was 7 by 7 pixels, not leaving space for an underline.
Like the MDA, each character in the grid was represented by two bytes, one representing
one of 256 characters, the other for attributes (IBM 1-133). The need to represent color
information required a change in how the bits in the attribute byte were allocated. Colorsof the fore- and background were independently selectable on a per-character basis, froma list of 16 colors (8 colors, each in a low- and high-intensity version) (IBM 2 6). To
make room for this, the underline bit was dropped from the attribute byte forcing
developers to choose one of the other methods to emphasize characters, for example color
or inverse video.
The CGA also allowed for Graphics Mode in which specific pixels wereindividually addressable. Three modes were available which traded off between numberof pixels and number of colors per pixel (IBM 2 9). Underline could be used in this mode
(as could any other interface he wanted to design) if the designer of an application choseto include it, but a developer of business applications (for example, Microsoft Word, in
its original incarnation) would have been more likely to develop in the A/N mode, using
box-drawing characters where necessary to simulate a graphical interface (IBM 1-114).

IBM Enhanced Graphics Adapter and Video Graphics Adapter. IBM improved on CGA
and released the Enhanced Graphics Adapter in 1984, but the next major revision was
Video Graphics Adapter (VGA) in 1987 (Hart). VGA also supported A/N and graphics
modes, with an expanded list of supported colors and resolutions. While in A/N mode,the same bit scheme was used as in CGA, however the focus on the card, as the name

47
implies, was more on the graphic display modes, of which it had six (IBM 3 2-1). By thispoint, with the success of Apple’s Macintosh and the growing popularity of Microsoft
Windows, it was clear that graphical displays were becoming the standard. The lack ofunderlying support in A/N mode was made less relevant by the increased reliance ongraphical display modes to generate interfaces and text.

Apple Macintosh. Unlike its earlier forays into personal computers, such as the Apple II,
the Apple Macintosh was envisioned as a purely visual, desktop-metaphor based machinewith an integrated nine-inch screen of 512 by 342 pixels (Connolly 18). Unlike otherpopular display adapters in the 1980s, the Macintosh relied solely on its bitmapped
display mode, eschewing the then-standard text mode. Apple developed software called
QuickDraw5 to handle the rendering of the complex interface and manage screen buffers(Connolly and Lieberman 84). This technology removed the limitations of how text could
be styled from the hardware layer: a programmer could make software that could display
any type of modified fonts, as indicated by the many styles available out of the box,
including bold, italic, underline, outline and shadow (Connolly 114). These graphics
modes were built into the operating system layer which tightly controlled the look andfeel of applications. In the same way that hardware graphics modes offered “building
blocks” to developers, Macintosh offered these tools on the software level.

A notable omission from this section is the NeXT computer, the machine on
which Tim Berners-Lee wrote the original WorldWideWeb software. While closely

5. Not coincidently, the developer of QuickDraw, Bill Atkinson also developed HyperCard, ahypertext system to be discussed later in this chapter (Aker 98).

48
related to the Macintosh, I will, instead, discuss the machine in the next chapter, as it is
so closely tied to the web’s development.
Authors of web history, including Jakob Nielsen and Robert Cailliau havepublished excellent scholarship on web history and usability, but do not sufficiently
consider the material constraints of the hardware on which the early web was built. This
chapter has attempted to extend their work by including the details of hardware in theanalysis. To this end, I have chosen to go into the details of the hardware of these early
display adapters to illustrate the environment in which programmers were developing
their software. These programmers were not presented with a tabula rasa to create any
software they could imagine; instead, they had available to them a set of tools which
could be used to assemble a product which would achieve their goals. I do not mean todescribe these affordances in the negative: as the artist Matthew Barney’s oeuvre,“Drawing Restraint” demonstrates, from constraint can come great works of art.
However, I do posit that the question of choice may never have even risen to the level ofconsciousness, in some cases. For example, when presented with the need to highlighttext on a platform in which using inverse-video is possible and underlining is not, aprogrammer is liable to use the former without ruing the absence of the latter. The
material constraints of the hardware had agency, affecting the outcome. The affordancesof each machine shaped the software created on each one. This principle is at once
obvious and vitally important to understanding the development of the early visualpresentation of the web. This chapter has only cursorily discussed the cost of hardware,

49
but suffice it to say that for equivalent devices costs were multiple factors of what wewould pay today, even accounting for inflation6.
This chapter has provided a prologue to the invention of the web and the historyof the uses of the underline and the visual display of hyperlinks as well as an overview ofthe hardware on which early web browsers were developed. All of these topics are vitally
important to understand what choices were consciously made versus what were
determined by existing technology. It is often difficult to disentangle these factors, but agood understanding of the technological milieu can help elucidate the issue. This isespecially important when viewed decades later once radical advances in technology
have obliterated many of the constraints from the time. The stage is set, as it were, for thebirth of the web.

6. The archives of popular computer magazines such as PC Magazine and Macworld provide agood source of contemporary pricing and availability of hardware.

Chapter III
The Invention of the Web and Underline as Hyperlink Semaphore

The web was not developed in a vacuum, but amid of a great deal of researcharound hypertext and hypermedia systems in both academia and industry. In the late1980s and early 1990s, most of this research was focused on offline systems due to thedearth of networked computers in consumer and business environments. As an incipientfield, many of the human-computer interactive aspects of hypertext systems were in flux,and designers of systems such as HyperCard (and eventually the web) experimented witha variety of modes to display and interact with hypertexts. These offline systems, and theearly networked systems, shaped the understanding of hypertext and ultimately affected
the development of the web. The discussion below focuses primarily on how thesesystems represented hyperlinks in order to demonstrate the contemporary environment inwhich Tim Berners-Lee developed the web.

Contemporary Hypertext Systems
A number of hypertext systems achieved some level of success before the web.
The systems below all made an important impact on the public perception of hypertext
and its visual implementation.

HyperCard
Released by Apple Inc. in 1987, HyperCard was the first hypertext system to be
widely adopted by a general audience. For many users HyperCard was their first

51
introduction to hypertext, whether they understood it by that name or not. The novel
concept of hypertext, coupled with the power and flexibility of the HyperCard software
package, presented a communications challenge to Apple because unlike most software,
HyperCard did nothing on its own. Instead, it was a chimera: it could be used by bothdevelopers and users to create their own applications, including hypertexts. The softwarepresented a visual canvas to position GUI elements coupled with a database model and ascripting language (HyperTalk7) to facilitate interactivity (Vaughan 3). The rapid spreadof HyperCard among the non-specialist population, as well as its ease of use and ability
to create hyperlinks, vastly expanded the knowledge of–and expectations for–hypertext
systems in the late 1980s. The hypertextual capacity of the software even influenced its
name–originally dubbed Wildcard, owing to its multifaceted abilities–but there isevidence that HyperCard also influenced the public perception of hypertext. Vaughan
describes the process by which it was rechristened HyperCard: "Some people say theHyper prefix was tacked on to associate the product with the cachet of the emergently
fashionable hypertext phenomenon. Yet the chronology also suggests HyperCard's arrivalis largely responsible for hypertext’s new status as a fashionable idea" (Vaughan 25).
As discussed in the previous chapter, many earlier hypertext systems existed, butthey were meant for specialist audiences. Apple capitalized on the widespread adoptionof affordable personal computers and the burgeoning market for all types of software,
including hypertext systems, by choosing to include HyperText with every Macintosh
computer beginning in 1987. The author of HyperCard, Bill Atkinson, also created the

7. Apple initially was not going to include HyperTalk language, thinking users would only use theediting mode to make stacks, but upon seeing its potential for extensibility, decided to include it in the
distribution (Vaughan 3)

52
digital graphics program, MacPaint (which was also bundled with the Macintosh), anddescribed HyperCard as the “lowest common denominator” (Vaughan 30); by including
it on every Macintosh, the audience for HyperCard stacks (as programs created inHyperCard were called) would be extensive. The influences of Atkinson's MacPaint are
visible in the toolkit included in HyperCard, allowing extensive screen painting
capabilities and facilitating graphically-oriented user interfaces in an era when text-based
interaction was considered standard. Cutting-edge for its time, the preference forgraphical interaction in the included software reinforced the Macintosh paradigm ofvisual over textual interfaces. Despite HyperCard’s influence, the paradigm of using a
distinct link layer separated from content was an evolutionary dead end in hypertext
systems.
While HyperCard was certainly influential in spreading the concept of hypertext
to a general audience, it was not to be the forerunner of the web due to its single-user
nature. Stacks existed both for personal software (such as contact lists) and software
meant for broad distribution (such as encyclopedia-type software) released both on
physical media and on the internet. Vaughan reports that in 1987 over three hundred
stacks were available on Compuserve, but while widespread, each stack file could only
be used by one person at a time (35). The HyperTalk protocol allowed for network
interaction through extensions, but at its core the stack was meant for the solitary desktop
user to interact with hermeneutically.
The predilection for visually-oriented rather than textually-oriented hyperlinks
was baked into the structure of the HyperCard design system. HyperCard used theparadigm of the notecard to structure and present any type of data. Links could be53
established between cards with user-defined hyperlinks, or through scripting with theHyperTalk language, which was extensible for many other purposes as well (Vaughan
16). Each card consisted of a graphical background with an overlay of other controls,
including links. Individual words or paragraphs could not be be directly linked (incontrast to systems from decades earlier like NLS), although a similar effect could beachieved with some effort by using a series of precisely placed invisible links on top of
the desired word. The omission of textual linking makes clear that the intention of thedevelopers was for the visual paradigm (buttons) to supercede the textual (inline links).
Early HyperCard stacks functioned as simulacra to aid their adoption using
trompe-l'œil techniques (using artistic tricks to make flat images appear to have depth) to
replicate the visual aspects of a physical referent. As Baudrillard describes in Simulacra
and Simulation, the precession of the simulacra begins by representing the physical world
as a simulation. Over time, this simulation becomes disjoined from reality and operates as
its own hyperreality, having lost any reference to the original object and becoming its
own reality. An advanced Rolodex stack purports to be a “Rolodex,” and has become a
Rolodex to anyone not familiar with the real thing. This process can be observed withmany computer applications, especially early Hyperlink stacks. As an example, theearliest successful stacks were digital Rolodexes, storing contact information in an easily
searchable and linkable format (Vaughan 43). The earliest examples of successful stacks
were faithful simulations of the real-world object, but over time additional features added
until they became an entity unto themselves. Digital contact lists have, to a great extent,
rendered Rolodexes obsolete, so the conversion to a true simulacra–in the Baudrillardiansense–is almost complete.

54
The Rolodex-clones used graphical depictions of paper cards to display contacts,
and superimposed icons (using symbols such as arrows or magnifying glasses) tofunction as links. Inline hyperlinks were not in circulation as hyperlink signifiers at thistime, primarily due to the complexity of implementing them. An icon could be imbued
with a “listener” that would respond to a click by activating a predefined HyperTalk
script. The “trick” of using invisible links could be employed to insinuate a more
complex interface, but centering a link on an individual word was complex in that editing
the text at all would require a manual shifting of all links. This anti-affordance ensured
that inline hyperlinks were never adopted in HyperCard. Were the capability to link text
inline to exist, it is very possible that the underline could have been used. Indeed,
underlining was available in HyperCard using its WYSIWYG text editor. Underlining
could also be achieved programmatically using HyperTalk, which included a function–“textStyle”–that allowed various types of formatting to be applied to any text on a card,
including text in a field, on a button, or on the background (Vaughan 601). The twofunctions were never combined, however.
As the discussion of HyperCard demonstrates, the web was not the first instanceof a hypertext system available to users. The web was also not the first widely usedgraphical information system to use links, although soon after its launch the web
decimated its contemporaries. The web succeeded where others experienced only limited
adoption for a number of reasons, discussed below, but its particular mode ofrepresenting hyperlinks helped speed its adoption. It is worth discussing these systems
briefly to highlight the way in which the web was revolutionary and flourished. This
discussion will also highlight the alternative modes of representing links available to55
developers at the time, and show that Berners-Lee’s use of the underline was notpreordained.

MinitelThe French government, through its telecom monopoly, PTT, developed a videotex
service called Télétel with an associated hardware terminal, Minitel8, to provide visualtextual information to subscribers over their phone lines. First deployed in 1978,
subscribers were issued a free-of-charge terminal with integrated keyboard, monitor, andmodem which could create connections to various services, some free, some for a perminute charge. Services proliferated through the 1980s and included shopping, financial
quotes, and news, with subscription rates skyrocketing from 11,000 in 1982, to over halfa million in 1984, to three million in 1987 (Abadie 108). While the web was beginning toblossom, Minitel continued to boom to six million users by 1993, bolstered by Minitel’s
killer apps: a free-to-use nationwide telephone directory and classified ads (Cats-Bariland Jelassi 1). However, the mid-1990s were the peak of the Minitel’s success withapproximately nine million users, and it was supplanted by other services, including theweb. The service died a slow death, with holdouts in certain industries–such as farming–
providing pressure to keep it active until its decommissioning in 2013 (Sayare).
Like other terminal-based applications, the Minitel console was limited in its
ability to represent visual information, both by the hardware of its monitor and the speedof its connection. The monitor used an “alpha-mosaic” display scheme: each character
was addressable and designers could represent a letter, number, symbol, or colored

8. The total system will be henceforth referred to as Minitel, per common usage

56
blocks to simulate graphics, with each cell acting as a crude pixel (Kessler). Available
commands were indicated on the Minitel screen in various schemes, but many used tables
to connect commands to the codes users needed to type to follow the link. Lacking amouse, all commands were entered using these codes or shortcuts through the keyboard,
making the system almost menu-based. Unlike the web–especially as initially envisioned
by Berners-Lee–Minitel was intended primarily as a distribution channel, with the vast
majority of data flow being from publishers to users. This is demonstrated by theasymmetrical modem hardware packaged with the original terminal: the upload speed
was much more limited than the download speed, as input was only envisioned to be
piped from the keyboard rather than uploading any types of files (Kessler). While its
adoption was limited to France9, primarily due to the government’s reluctance to expand
with a more open network, Minitel was a significant advancement in network computer
based, visual data services. However, the Internet and the web in particular, owing it theiropen and free form protocols, eventually supplanted Minitel, albeit later in France than inother European countries. The textual, code-based interface of Minitel was anadvancement over the many paper-based systems it supplanted (telephone books,
classified advertisements, agricultural reports, etc.) but its interface was still limited to
keyboard command, with minimal interactivity by design. Others have argued that the
installed base of Minitel coupled with its “killer apps” allowed it to keep running beyond
its time, but it is worthwhile to look at the question in the reverse: why did Minitel not
expand beyond France? Certainly, government policy was important, but if sufficientdemand existed in other countries, it could have been exported (there was a test in

9. Other teletex systems were established, but none has the market share of Minitel.

57
Belgium), or other national Teletex systems would have taken off; many other systems
were launched, but none succeeded like France’s. The lack of success might be partiallyattributed to the competition from the web due to its more appealing and usable interface:at the time when Minitel was reaching its highest usage, the web was beginning to takeoff and Mintel’s dated interface could not compete.

GopherProbably no technology had the potential to take advantage of the same latentdesire and technological milieu that allowed for spread of the web than Gopher. Theinterest in hypertext systems and the expansion of the internet provided fertile ground forthe development of such online communications systems. The study of Gopher isimportant because it presents a symmetrical counterexample to the web: a similar
product, created in a similar social-technical milieu which did not succeed (Pinch andBijker 406). Ogburn and Thomas wrote about this effect in 1922 in their essay, “AreInventions Inevitable?” and identified that with regular frequency major inventions are
simultaneously co-invented. They attribute this primarily to what they call “existing
status of culture:” potential inventors, possessing “considerable mental ability,” all are
privy to roughly the same knowledge and techniques to build upon at the same time(86).
To paraphrase Isaac Newton, they were all standing on the shoulders of the same giants.
Were it not for some small difference at key times, it is conceivable that Gopher could
have achieved ascendence rather than the web.
Gopher was created at the University of Minnesota in 1991 by a team led by MarkP. McCahill to improve the computer center’s help system, and eventually grew to be a58
full campus information system (Gilster 37). Like the web, Gopher used a client-server
architecture to display information on screen, although it was limited to textual content.
Despite this limitation, the system spread from the University of Minnesota to otheracademic, research, and commercial institutions such as the University of Texas, The
Electronic Frontier Foundation, and NASA (Gilster 45).
While a great deal of content was available on “gopherspace,” the menu structure
was simplistic: all pages were arranged in a strict hierarchy. On each page, the user waspresented with a menu of available sub-items. Selecting one of the items would bring theuser either to another menu, or to a page of content; alternately, the back command
would take the user to the parent page in the hierarchy. The menu structure allowed atype of hypertext–pages could be read non-sequentially–but not a hypertext system asrobust and intuitive as the web. Visually, there was no dedicated style for links, because
all links were part of a menu. The menu lists were numbered, featuring an arrow on theleft side to indicate which menu item was currently selected. Because Gopher was
intended to be accessible either by terminal or browser software, no graphical capabilities
were assumed and thus styling was minimal (Gilster 42).
At the time, much of the academic conversation around hypertext was focused on
the question of how best to demonstrate the underlying structure of the hypertext. Nielsen
described systems such as Perseus, which rendered content nodes as pictures of footprints
on a map to present a metaphor of a tourist visiting the content, or the use of overview
diagrams to visualize the connections between nodes (128-133). The only free-form
linking available to users of Gopher was the bookmarking system. Users could create apersonal bookmark list that was accessible from any point in the system and would

59
immediately take them to any page in Gopherspace, or to a predefined search string(Gilster 56). However, the fact that these bookmarks were created by the end user rather
than the content creator made it a fundamentally different type of hypertext system than
the web. In hindsight, the web succeeded because of, not despite, its lack of enforced
hierarchy or top-down presentation of the hypertext.
Melvin Conway coined an eponymous law about the way software is shaped by
the organization that develops it: essentially, the cultural context in which a software
product is created can have a profound effect on the timbre of the system. Gopher, auniversity campus information system, was intended to distribute information in a topdown manner, and the system that was developed replicated the hierarchical organization
structure of the university system. In contrast, the web was developed at a sprawling
research institution with a focus on collaboration, and was, not surprisingly, more
anarchic in nature.
Despite Gopher’s initial success, it was quickly supplanted by the web. The web
has many benefits over Gopher: integrated graphics (on supported browsers), lack of topdown structure, free-form hyperlinking. Tim Berners-Lee, however, posits that the main
reason that Gopher did not succeed was its financial model. In 1993 the University of
Minnesota announced its intention to charge an annual fee to license its Gopher server
software to non-educational entities (Berners-Lee and Fischetti 72). Whereas previous
internet-based communication systems, especially those born of the university, tended tobe free to use, the commercialization of Gopher stymied its development. Berners-Leemight have been demuring when he cited the commercialization of Gopher as the causeof its downfall; the web was also beginning to blossom around the same time, and thus

60
stole much of its market share. The web could do everything that Gopher could, including
accessing Gopher (with dedicated gopher:// prefix) and more, and without any licensing
fee–a stipulation that Berners-Lee thought critical to allow for its success, thus releasing
his project under the GPL or General Public License (73).

NeXTSTEP
This chapter has so far described the hypertextual milieu in which Tim BernersLee existed when creating the web. Before discussing the actual nascent stages of theweb, it is worth considering the specific technology on which he accomplished thisdevelopment. This section will switch from a ten-thousand foot view of late 1980s
hypertext to the microscopic view of Berners-Lee’s desktop environment. The tools
available to him both enabled and constrained his development in ways that shaped thefuture of the visual presentation of links on the web. Had he developed on other common
hardware, such as the previously mentioned Macintosh, the resultant reference softwareand specification would likely have been very different. The following discussion of the
hardware, software, and ecosystem of the NeXT computer will show the influence it hadon the design of the web.
While working at CERN in 1989, Tim Berners-Lee used the new, untested
computer called the NeXT Cube to develop the first web browser. The Cube was
expensive compared to other desktops available at the time, and it was used by few of hiscolleagues. However, the graphical capabilities and object oriented design of the Cube
made it consonant with his vision, and also shaped the visual presentation of the first web
browser, WorldWideWeb. The Cube was released in 1989 by NeXT Inc. (which later61
become NeXT Computers) and was the first model ever produced by the company. The
history of the NeXT is tied up with that of an earlier computer referenced previously, theApple Macintosh. Steve Jobs, one of the founders of Apple, left the company in 1985 tostart NeXT. NeXT intended to produce an advanced desktop/mainframe hybrid for thehigher-education market which, Jobs claimed, would not directly compete against Apple(Stross 74). The claim proved to be disingenuous, as NeXT eventually began marketingthe computer to other industries as well, to the chagrin of Apple which brought suitseeking an injunction.
Jobs was unable to replicate his success at Apple with NeXT. The computers they
produced, while being well-designed and featuring a very advanced operating system,
were deemed too expensive for their market and the expected demand for them nevermaterialized. Many of the technologies used in the NeXT, such as voice email, could
only be taken advantage of if many other users also had NeXT computers. Network effectcan be a very powerful force towards adoption, but NeXT’s focus on one industry and its
high price point were too strong of counterforces. Stross put the relative popularity of the
NeXT and the Macintosh in perspective by pointing out that between 1985 and 1992,
NeXT sold 50,000 computers, while Apple sold that many in the average three day period
in 1993 (3). The lack of adoption of NeXT at CERN was even a stumbling block when
Berners-Lee was trying to introduce the web to internal users there, as will be discussed
in the next section.
From the beginning of its design, the NeXT was intended as a revolutionary,visually oriented computer, much like the Macintosh was in 1984. Like the Macintosh,
the NeXT Cube was sold as a package with a special mouse, keyboard, and monitor

62
designed for and required by the computer; a NeXT laser printer was optional. A great
deal of effort was put into the visual output of the computer, both on the screen and thelaser printer–to the detriment of the actual power of the machine, according to its critics.
The core visual technology of the NeXT was Display PostScript, a version of the
PostScript language which controlled the display of images on the screen and on theprinter, resulting in true WYSIWYG output (Stross 12). The Display PostScript softwareran on top of Window Server, which in turn ran on the Mach Unix kernel, the basic
operating system of the NeXT (Webster 42). The NeXT monitor, called the MegaPixel
display, was a 17” CRT coupled with a 256k video buffer capable of displaying 4 levelsof grey at a resolution of 1120 by 832 pixels (Webster 38). The monitor was large for thetime and its 94-dpi resolution was very clear, but color screens were becoming morecommon so it was not received as such a revolution as the Macintosh (Webster 41). The
computer hardware itself was competitive, but not exceptional for its time and did not
wow consumers. Its computing hardware was built onto one robot-assembled card whichconnected to other internals including a magneto-optical drive and optional hard drive
through an internal communications bus: this bus also allowed the insertion of
hypothetical expansion cards which never came to fruition (Webster 12). Finally, the
NeXT came with a built-in port for ethernet and the software to support communications
over the protocol. Much of the appeal was in its visual design–a striking, jet-black cube–
its provenance–being the newest computer from Steve Jobs–and its object oriented
software system–NeXTSTEP.
Rather than using an existing architecture, NeXT Inc. opted to use a new CISC
processor from Motorola. This decision rendered the vast array of programs available on

63
Macintosh and IBM machines out of reach of the NeXT Cube. Any existing software
would have to be rewritten: a task that was not appealing to software companies forwhom an investment in re-architecting their products was a matter of speculation
predicated on the widescale adoption of the NeXT. As a result, the computer launchedwith almost no third-party applications (Stross 169). Not surprisingly, much of the
popular press lambasted NeXT for the deficient software library. However, Bruce F.
Webster, in The NeXT Book, a 1989 user guide and introduction to the platform, spun it
as a selling point. He claimed that the Interface Builder software included with the NeXT
was sufficiently easy to use and powerful that users would prefer to build their own
software to suit their needs rather than purchase pre-built software off the shelf (99).
Whether or not this was a viable marketing strategy, Interface Builder did allow Tim
Berners-Lee to develop his reference browser without the need for additional tools ordevelopment environments.
The software that was prepackaged with the NeXT Cube was rather advanced andtook advantage of the Display PostScript subsystem to facilitate well-designed, easy touse software, such as the WYSIWYG WriteNow text editor. NeXT programs werecreated using a series of prepackaged utilities. At the highest level, Interface Builder gave
developers tools to quickly create graphical user interfaces (GUIs) with precoded widgets(Webster 128). Using standardized drag-and-drop components, the tedious task ofprogramming basic interface elements and their associated handlers was streamlined,
speeding development time and increasing standardization amongst software.
Importantly, the Interface Builder output its code in Objective-C; while other languages
could be used in NeXT, the integration of the Interface Builder biased application

64
developers to use it. The Application Kit software library formed the foundation for theInterface Builder by providing the needed functions for developers to interact with thelower levels of the system, including Window Server which handled screen drawing tasks(Webster 119). This powerful software stack afforded developers the ability to create
fully-functional programs using the Objective-C language which could take advantage of
all of the hardware capabilities of the NeXT.
As the name implies, Objective-C is an object-oriented language based on C; thisdovetailed with the NeXTSTEP system which itself was object-oriented, a novel concept
in commercial systems (Webster 131). This method of design allowed for extensive reuseof code among applications and simplified application development. The NeXTSTEP
system was actually the NeXT product with the longest influence, eventually being
ported to run on standard computer architectures after NeXT abandoned hardware
production and sold its intellectual property to Apple (Stross 177). The use of the objectoriented techniques is visible in the design of WorldWideWeb, the first web browser,
which Berners-Lee developed on the NeXT Cube. Most of its interface, what we now callbrowser “chrome,” is built with stock components of the NeXT operating system. The
menu structure in NeXTSTEP was a standard component across applications andincluded submenu panels such as Document, Edit, Find, and Font (Garfinkel 32). The
font menu includes a limited number of text styling options that recur throughout thesystem such as bold, italic, and underline. Programs could implement these menus as-is
or add or remove items from them in their programs. WriteNow, for instance, strangely
chose to omit underline as an available option for formatting documents (Webster 242).
NeXTSTEP programs could also use Rich Text Format (RTF), a markup language

65
created by Microsoft to allow extensive formatting of display documents in code
(Garfinkel 311). Due to its fluidity with presenting material on the screen and in print(owing to its Display PostScript software) and the demand for desktop publishing, the
NeXT was designed with extensive text formatting capabilities, giving designers great
flexibility in displaying text.
It is interesting to note that the NeXTSTEP system came prepackaged with anexisting hypertext in the form of its online help system. The help system could beaccessed from most application menus, and individual articles were cross-linked withothers. Links were listed at the bottom of articles and signified with a small diamond icon
next to the link title. The inclusion of a hypertext system in this context demonstrates
that, by 1989, offline hypertext was already commercially applicable and the paradigm
was primed for wider adoption. The NeXT computer, with its advanced conceptual
underpinnings, was an obvious candidate for the development of a revolutionary system
like the web, but it also made it ahead-of-its-time for a wider user base.
The capabilities of the NeXT computer and NeXTSTEP led Tim Berners-Lee tochoose it to build his demonstration web browser. Many of the particular affordances of
the computer platform then influenced his actual implementation of WorldWideWeb. The
use of Objective-C to code the browser was a product of Interface Builder and its objectoriented code creation. NeXT’s ethernet capabilities were a prerequisite for thedevelopment of HTTP over the CERN network. Finally, the windowed graphicalcapabilities of HTML would have been difficult to implement on an alternative system.
WorldWideWeb could have been developed on another platform, such as X Window or66
Macintosh, but the outcome could have been very different due to the best-practices andstock functionality of those systems.

Tim Berners-Lee and the World Wide Web Standards
As the inventor of the web, Tim Berners-Lee’s life and work has been well
documented, and I will not attempt to summarize it extensively here, however it is worth
noting that when one attributes the invention of the web to him, it is not hyperbole. His
work on creating the three fundamental components to the web–Hypertext Markup
Language (HTML), the Hypertext Transportation Protocol (HTTP), Universal Resource
Locators (URLs10)–and their corollary the web browser (WorldWideWeb), was not the
product of a committee or extensive collaboration. Each of these aspects of the web havetechnological precedents, of course, having been based on some underlying technology.
In fact, Ralph C. Epstein debunked the “heroic theory” of invention in favor of a “theoryof small increments” as far back as 1926 (237). By observing that “a given invention ismerely the culmination of a train of effort reaching back into the past and brought tofruition in the present” he asserted that “no invention is dependent upon the presence of
any one individual” (242-246). This section makes no claim counter to Epstein’s
observations, however, approaching the development of the web by looking at BernersLee’s decision is appropriate in this case because of his role in furthering each technology
and combining them into a new whole. Of course, once it was released to the world, theweb took on a life of its own, all the more so due to its open standards and lack of

10. The name Universal Resource Locator was eventually changed to Universal Resource
Indicator to acknowledge the fact that the location of files and page could change over time. For theremainder of the paper, URI will be used.

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commercialization. In turn, this section will discuss each of the three web standards
Berners-Lee developed and how they shaped the development of the underline being used
as a hyperlink signifier.
Tim Berners-Lee worked at CERN, the European high-energy physics lab, as aprogrammer in the 1980s, first as a consultant and later as a fellow (12). Despite taking a
degree in physics, his task was not directly physics-related, nor was he hired to write ahypertext system. Berners-Lee worked on the more prosaic work of networking andsoftware development. Both of his first hypertext projects were side projects: Enquire,
written around 1980, contained the kernel of the web, but was not distributed and also
represented links as a list below the content, like many previous systems (17). The
method of link lists was also visible in Vannevar Bush’s Memex concept, which, alongwith Ted Nelson and Douglas Engelbart was cited as an influence by Berners-Lee (5).
CERN was highly networked but with heterogenous systems that madeintercommunication between users difficult. It was from this challenge of sharing
knowledge that the impetus of the web was born; in fact, the challenge had been taken up
previously without success at the lab, but with attempts that were too structurally
restrictive, in Berners-Lee’s opinion (15). His proposal to develop a successor to his
Enquire hypertext system languished for some time before being approved in 1990, when
he was granted funds to buy a NeXT computer and spend time working on his vision(23). This decision to use the NeXT rather than the popular Macintosh or IBM systems
commonly used at CERN would prove to shape the visual aspects of his product.
Berners-Lee, who was respected at CERN for his brilliance and foresight, posits that his

68interest in and enthusiasm for the new computer was a larger factor in receiving approval
for the web project than institutional interest in the project itself.
What would become known as the web was named World Wide Web (or W3) inBerners-Lee’s original proposal, and early writings. The first two components of the
proposal, HTTP and URIs, were probably the most important, but the least relevant tothis study so they will be discussed only in brief. HTTP “is a very simple internet
protocol, similar in implementation to FTP and NNTP… [which]… sends a document
identifier with or without search words, and the server responds with hypertext or plain
text. The protocol runs over TCP” (Berners-Lee, et al. 4). Berners-Lee intended theprotocol to be be very simple and easy to implement, and to cause a minimum ofoverhead to users. The other specification, URI (originally UDI, for Universal Document
Identifier) is a standard format to identify documents on the web and was agnostic
towards the protocol of the server, so it was not limited to the HTTP protocol. In thisway, Berners-Lee hoped that the web could coexist on the internet with other protocols(Berners-Lee and Fischetti 38). These two protocols worked together to allow the web toexist in a fully decentralized fashion, with no central authority, thanks to the URI
structure. Berners-Lee cites decentralization as the key reason why the web flourishedwhere other systems such as Gopher did not (Berners-Lee and Fischetti 37).
Berners-Lee developed HTML as a way to structure hypertext and add links
between documents in a manner that was lightweight, rejecting advanced formatting
capabilities. He cites TeX as an example of an overly powerful solution to the problem offormatting text within HTML, and raises the “principle of least power” as the reason hechose simplicity over complexity in formatting (Berners-Lee and Fischetti 182). Besides,

69
advanced formatting could be handled with third-party content handlers. From the
beginning, Berners-Lee was concerned with interoperability of the web across multiple
computer platforms; he wanted to ensure that all elements of his specifications would
work on any popular computer platform–at least to some extent–so limiting the visual
options available was a way to create a least common denominator for browsers. It is
ironic, then, that the first web browser was a created on the NeXT platform: an
uncommon and highly sophisticated computer system. The early web browsers will be
discussed in the next section, but the first paper published by Berners-Lee about the web
made specific accommodations for browser software of all capabilities, and definedHTML to work across all of them. In his paper, “World Wide Web: An Information
infrastructure for high-energy physics,” published under the auspices of CERN, BernersLee describes the display of hyperlinks in HTML:On a graphic terminal, a reference is represented by a sequence ofhighlighted text, or an icon. The user clicks on it with the mouse, and thereferenced document (or part of a document) appears. On a line modeterminal, a reference is represented for example by a number in the text:
the user types the number to follow the reference. (Berners-Lee, et al. 1)
His view was that the need for interoperability and increased adoption outweighedgraphical presentation. When the paper was presented in 1993, Berners-Lee was stillpushing for the wider adoption of the web at CERN, let alone the rest of the physics
community and the world.
While Berners-Lee had a vision for the web, its broader meaning was not fixed.
Through the lens of social construction of technology (SCOT) as elucidated by Pinch andBijker, the meaning of a given technology is not implicit to the technology nor
monolithic, but shaped by the understanding of the technology in its context (421). The

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interpretive flexibility of a technology could be seen in the conflicting view that someusers at CERN has of the web. Many viewed it as powerful internal directory: unaware oruninterested in its potential as a global data system. Neither view was correct, but hadclosure of the web’s meaning not been reached as it had (in SCOT terms, the stabilizationof the artefact), it could have been pigeonholed into that one use (Pinch and Bijker 424).

HTML
The specification of HTML had an effect on the visual display of hypertext on theweb, while also leaving many design decisions up to web browser software. This section
discusses the evolution of the specification of HTML and the extent to which it
constrained display aspects. While the URI and HTTP protocol were key to making the
web what it was, Berners-Lee underestimated the importance of HTML in making it a
success. He expected that HTML would be just one option to present content over theweb, no more important than any other content system. In time, HTML proved to be
wildly successful because of its ease of use, simple code structure, and graphicalorientation. To ease the acceptance of HTML at CERN, Berners-Lee chose to model it on
the SGML standard, which is a meta-language used to define markup languages(Berners-Lee and Fischetti 41). SGML had adherents at CERN and the familiarity withthe structure helped researchers there comprehend what this new system was. As
revolutionary as the web was, nothing is created from whole cloth; a system that is too
advanced will have a hard time gaining supporters who will have difficulty understanding
the system, even if it promises great power. Berners-Lee intended HTML to be both

71
familiar enough to be readily understood by users, and simple enough to function as abasic interchange format that all servers could, at a minimum, speak and understand.
HTML had been in development since 1990, with implementation information
available on the CERN website, but the first published HTML proposal was released as
an “Internet Draft” of the Internet Engineering Task Force by Tim Berners-Lee andDaniel Connolly in June 1993. This document contained an overview of the web withdescriptions of how HTML interacts with HTTP and URI, as well as a full specificationof the HTML syntax and tags. For many tag descriptions, the authors included rendering
instructions which described “[t]he form of presentation of information to the humanreader” as well as noting its typical rendering which “is not a mandatory part of thestandard but is given as guidance for designers and to help explain the uses for which theelements were intended” (2). While many HTML elements have renderings described,
that section is notably absent for anchor (<A>) tags, which define hyperlinks between
documents and are therefore one of the most important elements in HTML. The only hint
given as to specific rendering of hyperlinks is a note under the METHODS attribute of
the anchor tag documentation which “provide[s] information about the functions which
the user may perform on an object” (14). It states, “[f]or example, the browser may
choose a different rendering as a function of the methods allowed (for example
something which is searchable may get a different icon)” (14). This suggests that thevisual indication of hyperlinks is left up to the browser to determine, and that icons could
be used to do so. The standard proposes the idea that different link relationships could be
codified using the LINK attribute of anchors, and that based on the link relationship value
could be styled differently. In practice, this was not used extensively, with most anchors

72
being undifferentiated and thus styled identically. Were this feature widely adopted, thevisual presentation of hyperlinks may have been much more multifaceted in practice.
However, trying to represent many different types of links presents its own design
challenge: Jakob Nielsen tested the ability of users to distinguish link types in the Guide
hypertext system and his results, published in Multimedia and Hypertext, indicate that,"[i]f the hypertext will have only a few link types, then color or line patterns are suitablechoices, but human ability to understand and distinguish such an encoding is limited toabout seven different values" (135). This omission of a typical rendering of hyperlinks isinteresting in contrast to the detailed manner in which the specification defines otherelements. For example, the Address tag’s typical rendering is defined as:
Typically, an address element is italic and/or right justified or indented.
The address element implies a paragraph break. Paragraph marks within
the address element do not cause extra white space to be inserted. (14)The juxtaposition of these tags implies that the silence of the authors’ part on the visual
rendering of the hyperlink in this specification was not simply an omission.
Another hypothesis as to why there was no description of the preferred renderingof the hyperlink in the first proposed web standard is that the authors intended it to beplatform-agnostic: many early users were accessing the web using non-graphical systems.
However, that is belied by the inclusion of explicitly graphical content in other portionsof the standard (although with the caveat, “ Where not supported by implementations,like all tags, these tags should be ignored but the content rendered”) (24). The renderingsof the Heading tags (H1–H6) require the browsers to be able to justify text, present
multiple font sizes, and print in bold and italic, albeit as suggested implementations (16).
The specification also contains an entire section on character highlighting which define

73
the visual display of the given text in more or less explicit manner; sections include
strong, italic, and underline.
Despite not providing an explicit rendering recommendation for hyperlinks, thefirst web standard proposal implicitly shaped the look of links. First, anchor tags are tags:
they wrap a piece of text and provide additional semantic value to it, a property inheritedfrom SGML. Any reasonable rendering in this standard would need to display not justthat a link exists, but the extent of the text to which it is attached. A rendering such as
putting an icon inline with the text would be semantically insufficient because it could
only show where the link begins or ends, not what it encapsulates. For this reason, thespecification negates an implementation such as what was used in NLS. If icons wereused (as the specification suggests they could be) it would need to be in conjunction withanother signifier. Second, and more generally, anchor tags are specific to a place in thehypertext. This property semantically precludes a list of hyperlinks at the end of the
document, such as that used in Gopher or the NeXT help system. In these ways, thestandard implicitly constrains the possible representations of hyperlinks that a web
browser could implement while remaining semantically consistent with the intent of
HTML.
The second web standard, HTML 2.0, was promulgated in November 1995 andcontinued to be mute on hyperlink styling. Interestingly, the underline tag (<U>) did not
make it into this standard, and is listed as one possible browser extension (“Hypertext
Markup Language - 2.0”). HTML 3.2 superceded 2.0 in early 1996; it included theunderline tag, but continued to leave hyperlink representation up to browsers. It also
makes provisions for the increasing role of style sheets in formatting screen output

74("HTML 3.2 Reference Specification”). The HTML 4.0 standard, published in 1997,
made a significant change in the ideology of visual representation of HTML with therelocation of visual attributes–such as color and fonts–from tags to style sheets definedusing the Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) language ("HTML 4.0 Specification"). This
iteration of the standard was also the first to give a suggestion on representing links
visually. Section 12.1.3 dealing with anchors says that, “user agents may render thiscontent in such a way as to indicate the presence of a link (e.g., by underlining thecontent)” which is the first time the notion that the underline could or should be used was
mentioned. By this time, the web had grown substantially and web browsers werecoalescing on best practices. Also, the visual browsers were by far the most common way
to access the web, so accommodations for textual browsers were less central to thedecision makers in W3C.
The current version of HTML, HTML5 was released in October 2014 and goes
further than previous standards in trying to separate the semantic from presentational
content of an HTML document. Berners-Lee, as the leader of the W3C organization, hasmade clear that his goal in improving the web is to make content more machine-readable
and semantically oriented, and HTML5 clearly attempts to further that goal. However,
the extensive installed base of web browsers and constellation of web servers also
requires backwards compatibility to remain intact. HTML5 attempts to balance these two
considerations and in many cases uses awkward retroactive continuity to elide thepurpose of earlier visual elements. Deprecating these elements would rendering much
web content technically invalid, so instead, they gave them a new life. For example, theHTML5 description of the <b> element, which the HTML 1.2 proposal describes

75
succinctly as “Boldface, where available, otherwise alternative mapping allowed, ” does
not make any reference to bold at all, instead describing the element in section 4.5.18 as:a span of text to which attention is being drawn for utilitarian purposes
without conveying any extra importance and with no implication of analternate voice or mood, such as key words in a document abstract,
product names in a review, actionable words in interactive text-driven
software, or an article lede. (“HTML5”)
The section gives the advice that <strong> should be used where previously <b> would
have been the proper choice, but includes the tag anyway as a compromise. The same
pattern can be seen with the <u> tag. Defined in HTML 1.2 simply as “Underline,” inHTML5 its original purpose receives another lacuna. Its canonical meaning has morphed
almost to the point of unrecognizability from its abbreviated root:
The u element represents a span of text with an unarticulated, thoughexplicitly rendered, non-textual annotation, such as labeling the text as
being a proper name in Chinese text (a Chinese proper name mark), orlabeling the text as being misspelt. (HTML5)
However, the original purpose is revealed in a cautionary note on how not to use the tag–a note which is also the first concrete reference in any HTML standard to the use of theunderline for hyperlinks (HTML 4.0 only hinted at it). In section 4.5.19 about the <u>element, programmers are admonished:
The default rendering of the u element in visual presentations clashes withthe conventional rendering of hyperlinks (underlining). Authors areencouraged to avoid using the u element where it could be confused for a
hyperlink. ("HTML5”).
The “pave the cowpaths” strategy which defined the early standards–many tags entered
the standard as browser-specific tags which were canonized by W3C–is at once apparent
in these changing usages and contradictory to them. Rather than abandoning the tag, <u>
has absorbed new meaning. The standard also acknowledges the consensus, though not76
officially endorsed, of the use of underlining to recognize hyperlinks. This standard
essentially “gets out of the way” of the tide of common practice, while attempting togracefully support vestigial uses of tags. This is an intelligent strategy, but very much inline with Berners-Lee’s belief in making the web standards open, flexible, anddecentralized.
The HTML standard has evolved significantly over the years, with an increasingemphasis on separating the semantic content of documents from their presentational
aspects. In important ways, Berners-Lee’s conception of HTML narrowed the range ofpossible hyperlink visualizations due to the SGML-like tag system. Throughout, therepresentation of hyperlinks to users has never been strictly prescribed: its
implementation has always been left to the developer of browsers, or the creator of style
sheets (on either the user- or publisher-side). However, the common use of underline torepresent hyperlinks by developers became so pervasive that it forced W3C to revise its
standards to reduce the clash of meanings. The discussion of web browsers that follows
will show the important role that browsers had in leading to the coalescence on theunderline.

The Demonstration Browsers
Tim Berners-Lee’s specifications for the web, comprising of HTTP, URI, andHTML, would not have gained any traction without a reference implementation todemonstrate the web’s capabilities. To this end, he built the first web browser, called
WorldWideWeb in 1990. As he describes in Weaving the Web, Berners-Lee hoped to findoff-the-shelf software which could be modified to function with his newly defined web

77
protocols. Many hypertext editors existed, but they were primarily offline, single-user
affairs. Berners-Lee looked at the Guide software by Owl Inc., which had many of thefeatures he envisioned for a browser, but the company could not be convinced to edit thesoftware to meet his specification (Berners-Lee and Fischetti 26). After striking out withmultiple other software packages, he decided to write a new browser from scratch on the
NeXT computer platform. The NeXT computer made rapid software development
possible with its Interface Builder software and integrated networking support (discussed
earlier in the chapter). Specifically, Berners-Lee took advantage of a quirk of the text
editor widget of the Interface Builder: he used spare memory in the widget’s
representation of text to embed hyperlink data in the interface (28).
The WorldWideWeb browser11 relied heavily on the interface widgets provided
by NeXTSTEP, through the Interface Builder. Its menu bar consisted of a vertical stackof items, as was standard practice on NeXT, with options such as Document, Navigate,
and Edit. The main window of the browser was based on the skeuomorphic metaphor of a
blank page: Berners-Lee’s vision was for the browser application to be equally fluent at
reading and writing. Navigation (outside of following hyperlinks) was controlled througha navigation panel with options to travel back to the previous page, or use theprevious/next functions to travel through a sequence of linked hypertext documents. The
presentation of HTML tags was controlled by a style sheet packaged with the browser,
although Berners-Lee envisioned users being able to modify their style sheet to suit theirneeds.

11. Appendix I describes the process of emulating NeXTSTEP on modern hardware and running
the WorldWideWeb browser software.

78
CERN and Berners-Lee publicly released the source code for WorldWideWeb,
and a close reading of the code yields interesting insight into the stylistic history of thebrowser. The default styling for an anchor is defined in the source code as being
underlined. A commented-out line in the code of HyperText.m (the library which
implements the display of hypertext within WorldWideWeb) shows that links wereoriginally indicated by being a different color, slightly grey, but Berners-Lee deemed thatsolution “horrid” in a note in the source code and commented that style out (“HyperText
Implementation”). The use of underline was easy to implement because these werecapabilities of the Interface Builder’s text editing widget. Furthermore, bold and italics
were available as highlighting options for hypertext writers. The NeXT computer onwhich Berners-Lee developed has a grayscale video system, so no colors were used tohighlight links–blue links were a later invention. This marks the very first usage of theunderline to represent hyperlinks in a web browser, and thus on the web. The choice
would prove to be momentous, as in short time all major browsers would follow suit.
However, the reach of WorldWideWeb was limited by the minimal installed baseof NeXT computers; Berners-Lee realized that to increase the reach of the web, a textbased browser was needed. In 1990, a CERN intern programmed the “linemode”
browser12 to allow users of any computer system to access web servers. Since allcontemporary computers were either text-based or at least could run a terminal window,
no platform was left out (Berners-Lee and Fischetti 30). The web quickly spread at
CERN due to the killer apps of a centralized phonebook and access to other databases13.
Unlike the NeXT browser, the linemode browser eschewed any advanced styling, making
12. CERN maintains an emulated version of the linemode browser at info.cern.ch.

79
few assumptions about the capabilities of the terminal. When the browser came acrossformatting or styling instructions, it simply ignored them. Rather than underline, links
were represented by bracketed numbers following an anchor tag (e.g. “Click here to more[1]”). This compromise was necessary to accommodate the text-only interface, butviolates the principles of the HTML standard: the hyperlink signifier only indicates theend of the link span, introducing ambiguity and reducing the information-bearing content
of the hypertext. However, time has proven that the web was sufficiently powerful andversatile that this browser “kludge” was not ruinous to the spread of the web, even though
it was the first experience many had with the web.
Both the linemode browser and WorldWideWeb were intended to be
demonstration browsers to help users understand the power of the web and spurdevelopment of production software. To expand the audience which could experience theweb, at least in a cursory capacity, Berners-Lee set up a telnet server at CERN allowing
users all over the world to access the web through the linemode browser without thehassle of installing it locally on their computers, or possessing the needed network
software. From the beginning, Berners-Lee did not intend his software to be the portal to
the web, but only a template to show what the web could do. Very quickly, otherdevelopers took the baton and ran with it: within a couple of years of the initial standard,
the web was available with browsers on every platform. To foster the diaspora, BernersLee had his original Objective-C code rewritten in the more cross-compatible C
language, which he considered to be a downgrade from the object-oriented native
language of NeXT, but produced an easy to implement library which made the creationof web browsers on other platform simple (Berners-Lee and Fischetti 48). Developers

80
used this freely-released “libwww” library to port the functionality to a variety of otherplatforms which allowed the web to spread beyond CERN, thanks in great part to theorganization's decision that it was not worth licensing (Gillies and Cailliau 210).

Early Browsers
A number of early browsers were developed quickly with the release of libwww,
thanks to the coordination many individuals over internet message-boards. Informationand excitement for the web spread rapidly, and developers could share their software withothers over FTP easily. One of the first of this group of browsers, Erwise, was developedin Finland in 1992 and allowed the web to be accessed on Unix computers running the X
Window system (Gillies and Cailliau 210). X Window was a graphical package available
for Unix computers which allowed more advanced graphics than normal terminal-based
output. While a relatively simple browser, it followed Berners-Lee’s pattern of using
underlines to highlight links (“A Quick Look at Erwise”). MidasWWW, another X
Window browser, added another now-obvious detail to the functioning of hyperlinks: thechanging of color to represent that a link has already been visited (Gillies & Cailliau
225). A more successful browser was developed at UC Berkeley, also in 1992:
violaWWW, originally an offline hypertext system called Viola, was modified to work on
the web using for X Window by Pei Wei (Berners-Lee and Fischetti 56). The browser
featured many extensions to HTML which were eventually adopted into the standard,such as the ability to display images inline with the text and an early applet systemallowing execution of programs over the web (Gillies and Cailliau 214). Like theprevious graphical browsers, violaWWW also used underlines to represent hyperlinks

81(Wei). ViolaWWW made such an impression on Berners-Lee that he added a link to it tothe original homepage for the web, info.cern.ch (Gillies and Cailliau 217). This
imprimatur ensured that early Unix users with graphical capability would experience aversion of the web which represented hyperlinks with an underline.
While the X Window browsers did bring the web to Unix systems, they were still
limited to computers with graphical capabilities. This left users with text-based systems
only with access to the sub-par linemode browser: interesting in concept, but not
sufficiently enthralling to convert most people to web users. The Lynx browser,
developed at the University of Kansas, changed that. Like violaWWW, it was originallydeveloped as an offline hypertext navigator, but when it became obvious that libwww
was becoming dominant, the developers adapted it to the web and released it as version
2.0 in 1993 (Berners-Lee and Fischetti 68). Lynx was text based, like the linemodebrowser, but rather than using numbered brackets to represent hyperlinks it underlined
links. Lynx also has the option to use inverse video to highlight hyperlinks if that is what
the system permitted (Gilster 161). Approximating the interface technique of the mouse,
Lynx allowed use of the arrow keys to move the cursor around the screen with enter
functioning as a click, activating the selected link (Gillies & Cailliau 232). Lynx took off
on text-based Unix systems for the same reason the web had: the interface paradigm was
simple and intuitive. Clicking directly on a highlighted piece of text makes the text itself
the interface, which puts the user into the information space, and removes a level ofmediation that earlier computer information systems imposed. The use of the underline
balanced the subtlety of typography against the bulk of bolder interface devices such as

82
buttons or menus. The popularity of Lynx shows that the paradigm of the web was its
driving force, rather than just the graphical flash of the NeXT WorldWideWeb browser.
While the web was born on a Unix based platform, it did not take long to beadapted to the other popular personal computing platforms. The first PC browser, Cello,
was developed at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) in 1993 and wasbased off of libwww (Berners-Lee and Fischetti 69). Cello was an advanced browser
which added new functionality including inline images and the ability to select the colorsof elements on the page. In contrast to the other early browsers, Cello highlighted links
with a dotted box around the selected text. Around the same time, the first Macintosh
web browser, Samba, was released, also based on libwww. A very simple browser withminimal formatting capabilities, Samba represented links using boldface (Gillies &Cailliau 235). It is interesting that these two browsers–both trailblazers on theirrespective platforms–departed from the coalescing standard of highlighting hyperlinks on
Unix systems. This outcome demonstrates that other hyperlinks modalities were possible,
and tested, but ultimately were rejected when better software supplanted them.

Mosaic and its Spawn
The browser which brought the web to the masses (and almost supplanted it) was
also pivotal in ossifying the use of the underline for hyperlinking. Released in 1993,
NCSA Mosaic was developed at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at
the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, a government-funded computer research
center (Berners-Lee and Fischetti 68). The first release of NCSA Mosaic operated in the
X Window environment, as did many of its competitors. However, within a year of its

83
creation, a PC and Macintosh version were released and posted to the CERN website, still
the de facto homepage of the web (Gillies & Cailliau 239). The browser was robust, fullfeatured, and available across platforms, and it became popular almost immediately, to agreat extent displacing the other graphical browsers. As Berners-Lee discussed in
Weaving the Web, to his chagrin, so ubiquitous was NCSA Mosaic that it briefly became
synonymous with the web in the public conversation. As Jakob Nielsen notes in 1995, "itis interesting to contemplate fact that Mosaic and the WWW more or less succeeded inestablishing a universal hypertext system in just three years, even though Ted Nelson
could not get his Xanadu system accepted in thirty years of trying” (Multimedia andHypertext 1995). Mosaic’s ubiquity, however, finally sealed its representation of thehyperlink–the underline14–as the standard.
The NCSA Mosaic browser was not only the graphical inspiration for the next
generation of web browsers, but also their actual textual source. The Mosaic group spunoff from NCSA to create an even better browser in 1994 (Gillies & Cailliau 256). The
resulting product, Mosaic Netscape (eventually just Netscape) was based on the NCSA
Mosaic code and thus resembled it very closely, including its link presentation. The rapid
adoption of new browsers is captured in an early longitudinal web survey conducted by
the GVU Center at the College of Computing of Georgia Institute of Technology. The
January 1994 version of the survey found that almost all of the respondents used Mosaic
to access the web (although their survey methodology was biased towards Mosaic-using
respondents). By October 1994, 18% of respondents were using Netscape, and by the

14. Some screenshots available on the web show very early versions of the PC version of Mosaic
using blue-colored text without an underline as the hyperlink signifier. This appears to have been changed
to match the other platform version early on.

84April 1996 survey, almost 90% of users “expected to use Netscape in the next 12months.” In just a couple of years, the web’s browser landscape was upturned.
Internet Explorer had an equally rapid domination of the browser market, startingwith the same genes as Netscape. Microsoft, seeing the growing popularity of the web,wanted to the enter the market rapidly and to do so intended to include a web browser
with its upcoming Windows 95 software (Berners-Lee and Fischetti 108). Rather thanwriting its own software from scratch, the company elected to licence the core code of thebrowser from Spyglass, Inc. which itself licensed it from NCSA (Gillies & Cailliau 258).
The major browsers at this time were not just competing for market share, they werecompeting for pieces of the rapidly increasing pie, but both major browsers had
descended from the same ancestor. By 1996, the GVU study reported that almost 60% ofusers expected to use Internet Explorer within the next year. Internet Explorer also used
the underline to represent hyperlinks.
Without the benefit of retrospect, the contemporary press seemed very confused
about what the web actually was. The conflation of web with Mosaic is just one example.
In his book Finding it on the Internet, Paul Gilster writes about the web from theperspective of line browsers primarily, with graphical browsers being an outgrowth fromthem. He appears to be mostly familiar with using earlier systems like Gopher, and isunaware of the inherently graphical origins of the web. When he mentions Mosaic, heseems to demean it as a superficial extension to the web, which in his view is, at its core,text oriented. For example, "the difference between Mosaic and a standard, characterbased browser like www..." (169). With the popularity of the linemode browser and thenLynx, many early web users accessed the web through textual means and did not realize

85
it had graphical, mouse-based origins. Of course, NeXT adoption was low, and theMacintosh had not yet established extensive market share. Ironically, though, Gilster
acknowledges that formatting content is "lost" when browsing with VT-100, but he stillpresents that as primary and the graphic browser as additional.
The progression of web browsers has continued with multiple generations ofbrowser technology replacing the next, each one intertwined with the previous, bothvisually and through direct code transfer. That history has been documented andcontinues to evolve, but the die was cast in the earliest days of web browsers. By andlarge, browsers since Netscape and Internet Explorer have continued to use underlines torepresent hyperlinks, despite alternative options occasionally being tested.

Usability and the Future
The early years of academic interest in hypertext preceded the invention of theweb, but that interest was ultimately overshadowed by its dominance as the premier
global hypertext system. Academic research investigated many aspects of the userinterface to hypertext systems, including the optimal method of highlighting links.
Evenson, Rheinfrank, and Wulff addressed this problem as early as the 1989 Hypertext
Conference in their article “Towards a Design Language for Representing Hypermedia
Cues.” Their analysis enumerated many different possible ways to represent hyperlinks,
using as a jumping off point their observation that “most systems have used bold, italic or
underlined text to indicate a word is that is hyper...” but worrying that “these typestyles in
conjunction with plain text would disrupt the flow of text on the page (or screen) andinterfere with readability” (86). To solve this problem they proposed a variety of possible

86
solutions, including a new type of textual highlighting, before proposing “a new graphic
sign-set for the representation of hypermedia cues...based on the set of potential actions
within hypermedia systems” (89). Their set included an icon for each possible connection
between two nodes in a hypertext that they could think of. A sketch of their proposedsystem shows a textual hyperlink surrounded by a box, with one of their proposed icons
interposed within it. The authors viewed their system as necessary because theyenvisioned hypertext systems flourishing with a robust set of possible meanings attached
to a hyperlink. Ultimately, the simplicity of the web negated the need for multiple uservisible hyperlink signifiers: a link was monodirectional and monotypical.
Patricia Wright also approached this question on an analytical level in her article“Interface Alternatives for Hypertext,” published in the journal Hypermedia in 1989. Her
approach was also birthed in an environment where the default assumption was that a
hypertext system would have a complex link modality. Wright attempts to categorize allof the dimensions of hypertext interfaces along a “reader-limited→reader-free” axis,
looking at factors such as link display, link overview, inline versus menu-based links, andhyperlink type. Like the Evenson, et al. article, Wright considered the selection of linkvisualization a very open question, and non-obvious. Both of these articles assumed thatthe user would be “lost in (hyper)space” and that the hypertext creator would need todevelop extra tools and demarcations to give context to each link and page within
hyperspace. The concept of an overview map of the entire space was also floated in many
early discussions of hypertexts. Nielson explains how the hyperlink was sufficient for its
purpose on the web, and that users perform faster when links are in hypertext rather than
menu:

87
hypertext functions as "embedded menu”. . . [where]...parts of the primarytext or graphics does double duty as being both information in itself andbeing the link anchor. (Multimedia and Hypertext 138)
The simplicity of the web proved that these fears were unfounded, and a single identifier
for the hyperlink was sufficient. However, even with a single hyperlink signifier, there
was concern that choosing the wrong one could conflict with traditional typographicalusage. Evenson, et al. proposed a whole new typographic style, while Nielson presciently
acknowledged that:
Unfortunately the highlighting of anchors conflicts with the use ofemphasis in the running text. Traditional writers have used typographicalnotations like italics or boldface type to indicate various forms foremphasis or special purpose text like quotations…[b]ut many current
hypertext systems use the same or similar notation to indicate hypertext
anchors also…One solution to this problem may be …the gradualemergence of conventions for hypertext notation. (Multimedia andHypertext 140)
The simple solution won out over a more complex navigation system due to its ease ofuse and, both for content creators and readers. Nielson’s prognostication was not crystal
clear, however, as he predicted that websites would need to be highly hierarchical to benavigable, although he was writing before powerful search engines became available(Multimedia and Hypertext 256). By 2004, Nielson’s first prediction has come to fruition
and using underlining for links has become best practice, per his popular usability
website Nielsen Norman Group (“Guidelines for Visualizing Links”).
While the question was de facto settled on the web, academia continued toanalyze the optimal way to display hyperlinks. In 2001, in addressing W3’s XLink
proposal (for XML), Weinreich, et al. set to investigate whether it would be possible tostandardize link display. The paper enumerates the various colors, icons, outlines, fonts,
etc. used in earlier browsers and attempts to envision ways that a more rich linking

88
system could be displayed–harking back to the hypertext research from the late 1980s
and early 1990s. In 2010, Tullis and Siegel penned a paper “Does Underlining Links
Help or Hurt?” looking at whether the underline was still a good piece of the web’s userinterface. The result of the experimental study was mixed, with the results showing thatin some cases links aid usability and in others they do not, although the effect was small.
The design of the web is prone to trends, but is always mediated by its
technological underpinnings. The rise of the mobile browsing has changed the way thatmuch of web content is consumed. The smaller screen sizes and the use of touch screen
instead of a mouse have altered the affordances of the web in ways that are still being
studied. One could envision a schism between interface modes on mobile versus desktop
browsers, perhaps the extra pixels to display and underline are better spent elsewhere on
mobile. Or, users will become so used to hypertext that they can suffice with subtle clues
only. Time will show whether the underline is or is not a long standing feature of the web
into the mobile era, but designers are sure to continue innovating.

89
Chapter IV
Conclusion
As the first chapter demonstrated, the underline has a long history in humanwriting and has always acted as a vinculum tying text together into semanticallymeaningful units. Early computer systems adopted the use of the underline for various
purposes primarily because it was technically simpler to implement than alternativemodes of highlighting, and also because it was an easily understandable user interface
element. Early hypertext systems before the web used a variety of modalities to represent
links depending on the hardware available to the developers, these modes included
underlining, bold, reverse video, boxes, color, and many more. Tim Berners-Lee’sdevelopment of the web vastly expanded the reach of hypertext systems, and thanks to
the hardware affordances of the Interface Builder software packaged with the NeXT
computer, on which the first web browser was built, the underline was used to show
links. This initial condition set into motion a cascade of other web browsers modelled,
more or less directly, off of Berners-Lee’s. While there was some variability in their linkrepresentation, within a couple of years a steady state was reached with a progression ofhegemonic browsers all adopting the underline (Mosaic, Netscape, Internet Explorer),
despite the representation never being formally standardized. The actual code of the earlybrowsers (libwww) was directly used in other browsers, encouraging developers to hew
even closer to Berners-Lee’s vision. The basic visual representation of the web was evenported successfully to non-graphical systems, most successfully in the form of Lynx.
Tim Berners-Lee’s design of HTML as well as his demonstration browser also
shaped the visual look of the web, although to a lesser extent. The use of SGML as the90markup language for HTML defined links as a span of content rather than a point withincontent. This structure encouraged an inline representation of links, rather than amenu/list system, or one interspersing text with icons or buttons: both modes
implemented by other contemporary browsers. Berners-Lee’s HTML specification was
intentionally silent on the visual representation on hyperlinks, and did include multiple
link types to represent semantic information about monodirectional links, although thesewere not implemented in a generally useful way in early browsers.
At no point in the development of the web was a large, thorough test of all
hyperlink visualization modalities conducted. Instead, the pragmatic need to implement
his vision as a usable product motivated Berners-Lee to use the best tools available tohim to create a browser with preexisting tools. The technical affordances of the available
hardware constrained and shaped the software and eventual medium created on it. Thisobservation supports the thesis of George Basalla’s Evolution of Technology, which
posits that most technologies, even revolutionary ones, are built upon and shaped byearlier technical innovations. The “heroic” inventor, while vital to the creation of thegiven invention of technology, was working within a specific milieu and with access tocertain fundamental existing technology. In the case of Tim Berners-Lee, he was awareof existing hypertext projects and CERN provided him with a highly networked
environment in which to build and test his concept. The NeXT computer on which hedeveloped his browser made the use of underlining simple, and its existing semantic
meaning of overloading its referent with additional content made it logical and sufficientto the task of representing a hypertext span.

91This study intends to add to two related areas of study. First, it has explored thesemiotic meaning of the underline through a survey of its use through history and acrossdisciplines, including mathematics, commerce, printing, and user interface design.
Secondly, this study has shown how the underline was adopted to be the global hyperlink
signifier, expanding, but not fundamentally changing the meaning of the underline in
textual contexts, despite facing challengers from other symbolic representations. Futurestudies may be warranted to investigate the use of the underline in mobile contexts, or
future implementations of web browsers beyond the traditional confines of a desktop
browser. At the least, I hope it adds a piece to the stories of each topic.

92

Appendix
NeXT Emulation Process

In order to examine the WorldWideWeb browser in as close to its “native
habitat,” as possible, but with NeXT computer in short supply, I used emulation software
to run the operating system on modern hardware. The main challenge with emulation
NeXT hardware is that is used the proprietary Motorola 68000 series of processors. Most
modern desktop computers use x86 processors which use a totally different hardware
instruction set. Code written for NeXTStep on the 68000 processor is not compatible withmodern computers, and would need to be recompiled to work. Later versions of
NeXTStep and its successor OpenStep were ported to x86, but existing software (forinstance WorldWideWeb) would not run. Running one of the ported version of
NeXTStep /OpenStep is not very challenging and can be achieved using virtualization
software such as VMWare or VirtualBox. I initially installed NeXTSTEP 3.3 on
VirtualBox to explore the environment, but the CPU instruction set incompatibility madethis futile. To run the original software it is necessary to use emulation software which
simulates the 68000 hardware on a modern computer.
There exists a very active group of NeXTStep enthusiasts who have attempted tokeep the system alive and are centered around the web forum, nextcomputers.org. This
group has created an emulator called Previous (a play on words with NeXT) which
successfully emulates the original Next hardware including peripherals. I used this93
software along with an disc image of the original NeXTSTEP version 3.3 operating
system installation CD-ROM (acquired from Benjamin Woodley’s website).

The following resources were used to install a functioning NeXTStep installation:
Instructions.
● “NEXTSTEP 3.3 install in VMware on OSX part-1.” youtu.be/dj8Hyz-7arU● “Ben's VirtualBox Help Page.” by Benjamin Woodley● “Installing and running NextStep/OpenStep (Intel) on PC emulators” by Tomaž
Slivnik onnextcomputers.org/
Software.
● Browsers: nextcomputers.org/NeXTfiles/Software/● Boot disks: nextcomputers.org/NeXTfiles/Software/NEXTSTEP/Floppy_Images/● Installation CD-ROM ISO: sites.google.com/site/benvirtualbox/home/nextstep

94

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