Technology · 2
What simple symbol, introduced by Tim Berners-Lee in 1991, allowed users to jump between web pages with a single click?
Answer
The hyperlink
Tim Berners-Lee's concept of the hyperlink — clickable text or images that navigate to another document — was foundational to the World Wide Web, enabling the interconnected structure that defines the web. Without hyperlinks, the web would be a collection of isolated pages rather than a navigable network.
💡 Did you know?
Berners-Lee originally wanted to call hyperlinks 'doclinks' — the catchier name 'hyperlink' came from the broader computing community and stuck forever.
Other options people guess
- The bookmark
- The browser tab
- The search bar
Topics
- world-wide-web
- 1990s
- internet-history
- tim-berners-lee
Know your technology trivia?
Play a free Technology quiz and see how many you get right — no signup needed to start.
More Technology facts
Technology
What search engine, launched in 1994 as a human-curated web directory, was one of the first places people turned to find websites in the early years of the public World Wide Web?
Yahoo! originally stood for 'Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle' — a tongue-in-cheek acronym its Stanford student founders invented after the fact to fit a name they already loved.
Technology
Which web browser, released in 1993 by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, became the first widely popular graphical browser and helped bring the web to everyday users?
Mosaic was so influential that the U.S. Congress credited it with 'transforming the internet from a government tool into a global public network' in a 1994 resolution.
Technology
Which country launched the first national web index in 1993, allowing citizens to search domestically hosted websites before most countries had any organised web directory?
Finland was the first country in the world to declare broadband internet access a legal right for all citizens, doing so in 2010.
Technology
Which programming language, developed at Bell Labs in 1972 by Dennis Ritchie, became the foundation for operating systems like Unix and Linux?
Linux, which runs the majority of the world's servers and powers Android phones, was written in C — a language created before most of its programmers were born.
Technology
What password strategy did NIST's 2017 updated guidelines recommend instead of special-character complexity rules?
Passwords containing special characters are no longer recommended by cybersecurity experts because they're often predictable and harder for users to remember securely.
Technology
On the original iPod released in 2001, since the scroll wheel itself couldn't be pressed, how did users actually pick a highlighted song?
The original iPod's scroll wheel wasn't clickable—users had to press a separate button to select songs, making navigation slower than competitors' devices.