From Vannevar Bush's early thoughts, outlining his "Memex" machine, various stages of development have been followed.
Ted Nelson first coined the word "Hypertext" in 1965, with the introduction of his "Xanadu project" following in the early 70's. He along with Bush are credited with being the forefathers of today's internet.
The internet, the most common use today of hypertext documents, was started by Tim Berners-Lee in 1992. This was introduced as a text-based 1-way hypertext system, which in its infancy was rather crude & unfriendly to the public user. But in 1994 with the introduction of the "Mosaic" browser, which first allowed graphics to be added directly to internet pages, the internet really took off. With its use becoming more widespread every day.
Today, users frequently "surf" the web with little or no knowledge of the fact that they are in fact navigating hypertext documents. But, with often complete ignorance, we regularly view HTML (HyperText Markup Language) documents on URL's (Uniform Resource Locator) at sites on the internet which all have a unique location address, which starts off with HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol).