Oddbean

email first appeared in its early forms in the late 60s! it didn't become common until the late 90s and yeah, i remember the birth of hypertext... on my computer, back in 1989, the new Amiga OS 2 had this thing called "amigaguide" which was a form of hypertext document reader, and at my mother's university early versions of Mosaic (which was bought and became Explorer) appeared in actual fact, the real real original birthplace of hypertext was the Plan 9 Acme editor, which started blurring the line between text editor, command shell and document reader... in Acme you could type in a command, highlight it, and middle click, i think it was, and then under this text would appear the output of the shell command invocation and i'm pretty sure that the ideas of Acme still haven't fully percolated into UI design YET... and the main inventor of Acme was Rob Pike, one of the coauthors of Golang

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Bell_Labs he also at the time invented a language called Newsqueak (a language for mice) which the concurrency elements, the channels and coroutines, almost exactly landed in Golang, and was the main author of Acme and though it was 1992 before it hit official release, if you read up on it, it was definitely already being prototyped before HTML appeared (which is a derivative of SGML, which is also the root of Postscript, and goes back to the late 70s) the real root, i would say, though, is not relaly Pike but Wurth, who invented Oberon, which is an integrated GUI and programming language that used modules (like Go packages) and a paning window environment... it was similar in some ways to Smalltalk, which led to Windows and MacOS, but different in that it was focused on programming and scripting back in those days, i dreamed of running a full Oberon 2 environment, but sadly all i ever got was to read about it in obscure computer magazines