Comment by BirAdam
2 years ago
According to his own words, he wasn’t aware of Bush, Engelbart, or Nelson when he started working on Enquire, but hypertext more generally was known to him. He became aware of those other men and their work over time and their ideas helped to refine his own.
Thanks for that!
Incidentally, Vannevar Bush's Oral History 14-part document https://archivesspace.mit.edu/repositories/2/resources/687 seems to have served as an early experiment in prototyping hypertext. It has lots of [X-Ref] items throughout that refer to other relevant parts of the (1000+ page) oral history. I'm not aware of that being a common documentation practice at the time, so I see it as an intentional prototype effort on his part.