In antiquity, information was passed from one person and one community to another mostly orally. However, the situation had changed with the invention of alphabets and writing systems, which marked the development of information storage and retrieval.
Libraries became the first places to store information and comprised a large number of documents recorded over time. To navigate them, librarians created systems of book arrangement that included prescribed orders of source placement on shelves, card catalogs and records, and other techniques that many libraries utilize even today. Moreover, many stored documents were classified by topics and subjects they covered. In more evolved and complex information retrieval systems, various codes and indexes were used to correlate a plethora of sources in order to help find answers to specific questions. Nevertheless, library-based information storage and retrieval systems had substantial weaknesses since stored data became obsolete very fast. Moreover, the volume of information they allowed processing was limited. Thus, the creation of computers and the hypertext system became a major breakthrough in this area.
Ted Nelson developed the first Xanadu hypertext system in 1965. The main idea behind this system was to store everything that anyone had ever written in the electronic format. Modern hypertext databases do not store every single bit of information written before and allow deletion of old documents. However, they function based on the same principle, allowing users to easily navigate through massive volumes of information by using keywords and targeted queries in search engines. Independence from paper-based storage units and hardware (such as CDs and floppy disks) with limited storage capacity is a major advantage of contemporary hypertext systems. Besides that, they use advanced data retrieval algorithms increasing the precision of source correlation and overall information search.