Back in 1945, an Army radar technician named Douglas Engelbart read Vannevar Bush's article As We May Think, and he got it! His vision was that computer-based tools could augment human intellect, thus improving our overall ability to tackle the problems and goals -- both at the individual and social level.
During the 50's and 60's Douglas Engelbart went on to develop the mouse, many of the features that are found in all GUI's, integrated help systems, electronic mail, teleconferencing, and interactive Hypermedia. In 1963, he set out the conceptual framework for an interactive hypermedia system in a paper entitled, A Conceptual Framework for the Augmentation of Man's Intellect.
In 1968, he had completed the NLS (oN Line System), which was the early realization of his concept of an Augmentation System. NLS pioneered many of the features that are now integral to modern online multimedia systems; mouse, windows, e-mail, word processing, and hypertext.
To Engelbart, hypertext was quite important to his Augmentation System. That it would allow users to expand the information available to them, facilitate collaborative authoring, and become a critical focus for community, all key elements of the WEB.
This description of Engelbart's work is brief, as the concepts he pioneered are described in the multimedia and hypertext sections. However, I have included a bibliography of his work and a list of selected references to him and his work found in Yahoo.