Computer Lib / Dream Machines
TL;DR — Ted Nelson’s 1974 double book — hypertext described in full two decades before the web, by the man who named it.
Two books bound back to back and printed upside down relative to each other: Computer Lib (“you can and must understand computers NOW”) and Dream Machines, on what interactive media could become.
Nelson coined hypertext and hypermedia, and this is where the vision is laid out at length — non-sequential writing, transclusion, two-way links, documents that carry their own version history. The web implemented the smallest possible subset of it, and Nelson has been publicly unhappy about that for fifty years.
Read as a primary source on how much of the current internet was specified before it was built, and how much of what was specified never arrived.
Where this came from
132 pages. A copy is archived locally against link rot; the header links the original source.