dear downvoter: I am happy to counter each and every argument you may have, in case you should have any.

Otherwise forget the PR and dig deeper than usual.

ps: Actually, this MIT piece is like the CERN web pieces, run by the PR department of said institutions.

Such accomplishments are rarely if ever obtained by a single lab, or institution for that matter. They are rather embodiments of the spirit of the times, the effort of many of a given era implemented with the technology then available (see Otlet). The only question is, who gets to win the (often propaganda) fight for the claim and who gets to write history.

You're most likely being downvoted for tone and for lack of any support for your argument. HTML was based on SGMLguid... with one exception.

The only radical change was the addition of the all important anchor (<a>) link, without which the WWW wouldn't have taken off. [1]

Minor detail.

[1] http://infomesh.net/html/history/early/

prewar networked knowledge-base, pre-Bush:

https://archive.org/details/paulotlet

or google youtu.be Paul Otlet, visioning a web in 1934

biased incomplete list of link implementations pre HTML:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypertext#Implementations

The reason why WWW has taken off is very well described in:

High Stakes, No Prisoners: A Winner's Tale of Greed and Glory in the Internet Wars.

and has very little, if anything to do with the <a> incarnation, which as you say is a minor detail.