I remember my first encounter with the hyperlink idea. It was in a book about the different Internet protocols. I think it was somewhere around 1993 and I can’t actually remember the name of the book but there were sections on Gopher, Archie, WAIS and WWW. Today the Web is the dominant form of information access and probably many of the current Internet users have never ever heard of Gopher but it was equally important and “widespread” back in the earlier Internet years.
Anyway I was very impressed with the idea of hyperlinking and I consider it the best way to write documents ever since. Correspondingly the wiki systems are the best collaborative knowledge management tools.