It's the sort of thing which seems to not even need explaining anymore. Personally, I get the feeling that we're in an evolutionary period in which the inheritance of acquired characteristics is starting to prove itself: children are born with the ability to point and click with a mouse. Crispen writes:

Because Gopher menus are linked together, a whole world of information is available to us with just a few keystrokes!

Imagine if we were able to take these links one step further. Instead of linking menus, we could link *DOCUMENTS* together. You could read one document, find a keyword in that document that really interests you, touch that keyword, and automatically be taken to a NEW document somewhere else in the world -- and this new document could even have links to OTHER documents around the world, and so on.

Sound too good to be true? It isn't, thanks to something called "hypertext." If you have ever played with Apple's Hypercard program or the "help" menus in the latest Microsoft packages, you have already experienced hypertext. You "select" a highlighted word -- usually by clicking on it with a mouse -- and you are taken into an entirely new document or help screen.