Ben Shneiderman's claim, 13 April 2020: not the word "hyperlink". The interface. Embedded menu items. Highlighted selectable text in a paragraph.

Why blue, and why not red. Students ran more than a dozen unpublished experiments. On color screens, red made links easier to spot, and comprehension and recollection of the content declined. They chose light blue, which Tim adopted.

The path to the web: Tim told Ben he was influenced by the design as he saw it in Hypertext on Hypertext — the July 1988 CACM disk, built in HyperTIES, of the July 1987 Hypertext conference papers. ACM sold 4000 copies. Berners-Lee's Spring 1989 proposal cites that electronic journal as the source of the "hot spots" idea.

The chain Ben → Tim is attested by both. The chain Ben → Mosaic → the web's default stylesheet is not. Elise Blanchard argued HyperTIES was cyan, not dark blue. Both histories can be true at once.