Development began fall 1983 at the University of Maryland HCIL under Ben Shneiderman, as TIES — The Interactive Encyclopedia System — on IBM PCs. Dan Ostroff implemented the first embedded menus that year.

Renamed HyperTIES in 1986 after a cease-and-desist: "TIES" collided with an existing trademark. "By then 'hyper' was a growing term."

The NeWS workstation version, 1988–89, is the stack: C formatter, FORTH markup, PostScript applets, UniPress Emacs authoring. Don Hopkins wrote that layer. William Weiland wrote the C index manager the synonyms rest on.

Paper of record: A Look Back. This reader is that browser, pointed at markdown. HyperTIES is the front page.