We take the hyperlink for granted now, but this changed the form of humanity’s recorded information and texts from long, linear sequences to a graph, through which readers can take any path they choose.

Little glimpses in modern OSs are almost always welcome surprises: the contact card you can open from a messages chat; the meeting link in a calendar event; or even simply linking to a webpage from an email, or a document hosted online. Most recently, Apple added reminders to the calendar: if you set a date or time on a reminder in the Reminders app, you’ll also see it in your calendar on the correct date or at the correct time, where you can mark it as complete without switching apps. When things are nicely integrated across apps, it often feels like magic — but only because we’ve structured operating systems in such a way that each individual integration across apps must be custom-built for each case. For an OS that supports deep linking of all its things, such integrations would be an inherent aspect of its design.