[jacobolus]

The best example of prior art that I know is Simson Garfinkel’s SBook, originally developed in 1991. Any steps required to get from Simson’s idea to Apple’s version seem (conceptually) trivial and obvious.

http://simson.net/ref/sbook5/

It’s remarkable to me how much better SBook is at dealing with info like address book entries than anything mainstream today, 20 years later.

[jamesgeck0]

WikiWikiWeb may also be an example of prior art. It went online in 1994, with CamelCase words automatically being made into hyperlinks. URLs were also automatically transformed into hyperlinks as early as 1996. Unfortunately archive.org doesn't go any farther back than that, so I don't know if the feature was there from the very beginning.

[patrickgzill]

yes, I distinctly remember being quite amazed at SBook, when I used it on a NeXT machine in 1995. A year before this patent.