Actually Ted Nelson claims that hyperlinking comes from the 1945 essay http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-ma... which also contains the inspiration that leads to the scientific citation index. (Amusingly Google's PageRank is what you get when you apply the scientific citation index part of that essay to the most popular implementation of the hyperlink part of that essay.)
Now one may wonder how Vannevar Bush was able to have such great insight into how to make computing useful for people when computers were in their infancy. (For instance Von Neumann's description of the Von Neumann computer architecture came out only weeks before.) The explanation is simple - Vannevar Bush had pretty good ideas about how to make this stuff work because he'd been building/configuring/etc computers for almost 20 years at that point. And in his work he'd encountered all sorts of machines that handled information, including machines used for tabulating the census, and he'd been thinking about the memex for about a decade.
We live in a field that likes to forget its history. There is a lot more of it - extending back farther - than we realize.
Now one may wonder how Vannevar Bush was able to have such great insight into how to make computing useful for people when computers were in their infancy. (For instance Von Neumann's description of the Von Neumann computer architecture came out only weeks before.) The explanation is simple - Vannevar Bush had pretty good ideas about how to make this stuff work because he'd been building/configuring/etc computers for almost 20 years at that point. And in his work he'd encountered all sorts of machines that handled information, including machines used for tabulating the census, and he'd been thinking about the memex for about a decade.
We live in a field that likes to forget its history. There is a lot more of it - extending back farther - than we realize.