It's not completely related, but weren't the Lisp machines (and probably Smalltalk) printing out "live-objects" on the screen?

It's not related as the objects being printed (and could be clicked on) knew their identity beforehand, and established rather, rather than being "grepped" and then using heuristic establish connection to them?

But then what about say simple dictionary that finds words in webpage, and connect to the local or global terminology web-site (couple of tech-related sites have that). Or news site, where certain words are automatically linkified