So it's no surprise that Shneiderman and his students' extensive research on hypertext design and other related matters was featured widely in journals and at conferences.
Because plain text files don't have a way to specify what's a link and what's not, it was necessary to develop a way to " mark up" a text file with hypertext elements.
And that was basically where anybody could go into this program and contribute to this body of knowledge, this body of information, and it would grow and grow and grow and things would link to other things, that's hypertext.