Intertwingled: The Work and Influence of Ted Nelson (History of Computing)
by Douglas R. Dechow · 2 Jul 2015 · 223pp · 52,808 words
. More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/8442 EditorsDouglas R. Dechow and Daniele C. Struppa Intertwingled The Work and Influence of Ted Nelson Editors Douglas R. DechowChapman University, Orange, CA, USA Daniele C. StruppaChapman University, Orange, CA, USA ISSN 2190-6831e-ISSN 2190-684X ISBN 978-3-319
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paper Springer International Publishing AG Switzerland is part of Springer Science+Business Media (www.springer.com) From left to right , Dr. Douglas R. Dechow, Dr. Ted Nelson, and Dr. Daniele C. Struppa at Nelson’s honorary degree conferral We humbly dedicate this book to Marlene J. Mallicoat, Ted’s wife and our
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bridges between disciplines, but rather to realize that the divide between disciplines (or ‘subjects’ as Nelson calls them) is artificial and intellectually cannot be sustained. Ted Nelson has spent more than 50 years making us aware of the need for and exhorting us to develop the tools that would change the world
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the worldwide web becomes simply the technological realization of an intellectual decision. On April 24, 2014, Chapman University hosted “Intertwingled: The Work and Influence of Ted Nelson,” a conference to celebrate the anniversary of the publication of Computer Lib / Dream Machines and his many contributions to computing and to the generation of
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on the Xanadu system, your vision of the docuverse. In this volume, which takes its name from the conference, Intertwingled : The Work and Influence of Ted Nelson , Nelson, his colleagues and contemporaries from the computing world and the scholars who continue to examine his work take up those topics that have been
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50 years: hypertext, the docuverse, and Xanadu. We have organized the seventeen contributed chapters into four parts: I. Artistic Contributions, II. Peer Histories, III. Hypertext & Ted Nelson-influenced Research, and IV. The Last Word. As befits Nelson’s wide-ranging and interdisciplinary intellect, the first section includes a cartoon and a sequence
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resulted from Nelson’s ideas. In addition, several of the authors discuss what it is like to collaborate directly with Nelson. The penultimate section, Hypertext & Ted Nelson-influenced Research, wrestles with Nelson’s influence and legacy. The fourth and final section of Intertwingled, appropriately enough entitled The Last Word, is comprised of
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of Ted’s Vision Belinda Barnet 10 Data, Metadata, and Ted Christine L. Borgman 11 Making Links: Everything Really Is Deeply Intertwingled Wendy Hall 12 Ted Nelson Frode Hegland 13 History Debugged Daniel Rosenberg 14 We Can and Must Understand Computers NOW Noah Wardrip-Fruin 15 The Future of Transclusion Robert M
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. Akscyn 16 Ted Nelson: A Critical (and Critically Incomplete) Bibliography Henry Lowood Part IV The Last Word 17 What Box? Theodor Holm Nelson Contributors Robert M. AkscynKnowledge Systems, Las
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© The Author(s) 2015 Douglas R. Dechow and Daniele C. Struppa (eds.)IntertwingledHistory of Computing10.1007/978-3-319-16925-5_2 2. Odes to Ted Nelson Ben Shneiderman1 (1)Department of Computer Science, A. V. Williams Building, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742, USA Ben Shneiderman Email: ben@cs.umd
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.edu 2.1 Intertwingling Ted Nelson’s intertwingled brains, Spawn repeating rhythmic trains Telling stories in poetic scenes From ComputerLib and Dream Machines. His restless mind reveals a lyric vision Shining
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to his beliefs Original visions, zigging-zagging Fresh humping, bumping To what Markoff called “his grander ideals” 2.3 Early Admiration My earliest description of Ted Nelson was on the 1988 ACM disk Hypertext on Hypertext, which was the first electronic journal, incorporating the articles from the July 1988 issue of Communications
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network accessible from community-oriented computer centers. Nelson worked with the hypertext group at Brown University and collaborated with Andries Van Dam in the 1970s. Ted Nelson was one of the three keynote speakers at the Hypertext 87 Workshop. Recently AutoCAD, Inc. initiated a collaboration with Nelson and his Xanadu project. 2
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his colored pens ready for action Fig. 2.3Ted Nelson and author at Oxford Internet Institute in June 2006. Author is trying to show that Ted Nelson is number one Open Access This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial License, which permits any noncommercial use, distribution
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about personal computing and networks, including Sketchpad, the very image of personal computing. Some of the personal computing explorers included Douglas Engelbart, of course, and Ted Nelson and Andy van Dam. The Grail Gesture Recognition System on a tablet that was invented the same year as the mouse—1964—and the conventions
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(s) and source are credited. Footnotes 1This chapter has been transcribed and edited from a video created for the Intertwingled conference (Alan Kay Talk at Ted Nelson Tribute: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AnrlSqtpOkw). © The Author(s) 2015 Douglas R. Dechow and Daniele C. Struppa (eds.)IntertwingledHistory of Computing10.1007/978
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Author(s) 2015 Douglas R. Dechow and Daniele C. Struppa (eds.)IntertwingledHistory of Computing10.1007/978-3-319-16925-5_5 5. Hanging Out with Ted Nelson Brewster Kahle1 (1)Internet Archive, 300 Funston Ave, 94118 San Francisco, CA, USA Brewster Kahle Email: brewster@archive.org It’s a great honor to
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. © The Author(s) 2015 Douglas R. Dechow and Daniele C. Struppa (eds.)IntertwingledHistory of Computing10.1007/978-3-319-16925-5_6 6. Riffing on Ted Nelson—Hypermind Peter Schmideg and Laurie Spiegel1 (1)New York, NY 10013, USA Laurie Spiegel Email: laurie@xanadu.net Deceased Peter Schmideg was an actor, writer
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what was being written as a part of the full sensorium of experience as we live it, and all word after word. PS: Metaphysically speaking Ted Nelson’s Project Xanadu is Proust wired, electronically/digitally expanding stream of consciousness. Borrowing its name from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s unfinished poem, “Kubla Khan,”
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to conceive that they will not be. PS: Then Tim Berners-Lee packaged the Internet for the masses, with Andreessen tossing in graphics. Years earlier Ted Nelson had intended to stretch the Internet’s boundaries, as well as making it universally accessible. Sadly, HTML allowed Berners-Lee/Andreesen’s web to spread
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tend to aim for, putting our individual expressions through the narrow bottlenecks of language, music, visual art and our species’ other various mediating structures. PS: Ted Nelson wrote in Computer Lib (1974):Everyone should have some brush with computer programming, just to see what it is and isn’t. What it is
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alchemical theater, virtual reality. Artaud propounded magical realms transcending physicality. Computers can help us hone the physical world internally, reshape its virtual reality in cyberspace. Ted Nelson points toward interactive software synthesizing disparate media, breaking them down to their most basic form: in the case of text, a single letter; with graphics
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And since how future artists and information providers reap benefit from their wares must impact culturally every bit as much as style and content, Transpublishing, Ted Nelson’s alternative approach to copyrighting, also brings us closer to the broader vision. LS: Yes, ZigZag is another of Ted’s quite interesting innovations in
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: xanni@xanadu.net Intertwingularity is the idea that everything is deeply interconnected on multiple levels. I will therefore describe my own background and experiences with Ted Nelson, comment on some issues raised by other contributors, and describe my views on the intertwingularity of modern popular culture. I have always been interested in
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tried to civilize it, but everything they tried seemed to backfire. The giant pages resisted being squeezed into a smaller format, and the radical changes Ted Nelson predicted in 1974 were already starting to come about. Computer Lib/Dream Machines is one of the best examples of a technically advanced book delivering
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See segment on Claude, Shannon. 1952. Theseus Maze-Solving Mouse. (begins at 9:16 in the video). http://youtu.be/KmURvu4x0Do Part III Hypertext and Ted Nelson-Influenced Research © The Author(s) 2015 Douglas R. Dechow and Daniele C. Struppa (eds.)IntertwingledHistory of Computing10.1007/978-3-319-16925-5_9 9
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TH (2010) Possiplex: movies, intellect, creative control, my computer life and the fight for civilization. n.p., available at Lulu: http://www.lulu.com/shop/ted-nelson/possiplex/paperback/product-14925222.html 11. Nelson TH (2013) Eulogy for Douglas Engelbart. Speech at Technology legend: honoring Douglas Engelbart, computer history museum, mountain view
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Department of Information Studies, University of California, Los Angeles, CA, USA Christine L. Borgman Email: borgman@gseis.ucla.edu 10.1 Introduction My conversations with Ted Nelson began in earnest in 2004 when we shared an office at the Oxford Internet Institute (OII). He was working on Xanadu, and I was working
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, writing, networks, and hypertext – anything that could possibly inform the design of Xanadu and related technologies. The common thread of the data collection projects of Ted Nelson and Gordon Bell is that both acquire heterogeneous data types that must be integrated. Bell, a distinguished computer scientist at Microsoft, has the resources to
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Nelson, Swarthmore © The Author(s) 2015 Douglas R. Dechow and Daniele C. Struppa (eds.)IntertwingledHistory of Computing10.1007/978-3-319-16925-5_12 12. Ted Nelson Frode Hegland1 (1)10 Elm Lodge, SW6 6NZ London, UK Frode Hegland Email: frode@hegland.com 12.1 Introduction I’d like to talk about
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High Street, MS:SOE3, Santa Cruz, CA 95064, USA Noah Wardrip-Fruin Email: nwf@soe.ucsc.edu 14.1 Three Phrases From the endlessly quotable Ted Nelson—whose neologisms pepper the language we use to understand the present, from “hypertext” to “visualization”—perhaps no phrase is better known than, “You Can and
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M. Akscyn1 (1)Knowledge Systems, Las Vegas, NV 89135, USA Robert M. Akscyn Email: rakscyn@gmail.com 15.1 Introduction Transclusion, a term coined by Ted Nelson [5, 6, 9], is a powerful concept, that like hypertext, offers users considerable benefits. In Ted’s words:In this system, portions of content are
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95–118 © The Author(s) 2015 Douglas R. Dechow and Daniele C. Struppa (eds.)IntertwingledHistory of Computing10.1007/978-3-319-16925-5_16 16. Ted Nelson: A Critical (and Critically Incomplete) Bibliography Henry Lowood1 (1)Stanford University Libraries, Stanford, CA, USA Henry Lowood Email: lowood@stanford.edu 16.1 Introduction Devoting
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time to serious bibliographical matters as a tribute to Ted Nelson may seem like a quaintly out-of-tune and bookish, if not totally misguided project. It is easy to pigeon-hole Ted’s work as
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June, 79–81. Xanadu introduced in cartoon format. (Reprinted in The best of creative computing, vol. 3 (1980), 24–26) Nelson TH (1977) PCC interviews Ted Nelson. People’s Computer Company, February 5(4):41 Nelson TH (1977) Those unforgettable next two years. In: The first west coast computer faire: a conference
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://iospress.metapress.com/index/MH27753662736246.pdf Nelson TH (1994) Xanadu publishing with royalty: 1994 One BBSCON. [S.l.]: PlaybackNow.com. Audio recording of lecture by Ted Nelson at the ONE BBSCON in August 1994 concerning his ideas for handling rights management in electronic publishing Nelson TH (1995) The heart of connection: hypermedia
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computer conference Nelson TH (1998) Xanadu ZigZag hyperstructure kit: ZigZag commands for version 0.49. http://www.xanadu.com/zigzag/zzDirex.html. “System designed by Ted Nelson, programmed by Andrew Pam. These instructions by TN” Nelson TH (1999) The unfinished revolution and Xanadu. ACM Comput Surv 31(4es), December, article 37. doi
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payments system for network content materials. http://www.google.com/patents/US6058381. US Patent 08/961,570, application dated 30 Oct 1997 Nelson TH (2001) Ted Nelson at ACM hypertext 2001 Streamed video. http://vimeo.com/15593138 Nelson TH (2001) Interactive connection, viewing and maneuvering system for complex data. http://www.google
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Geeks bearing gifts: how the computer world got this way. V. 1.1. Mindful Press, Sausalito; distributed by Lulu.com. http://www.lulu.com/shop/ted-nelson/geeks-bearing-gifts/paperback/product-4312837.html Nelson TH (2008) System for exploring connections between data pages. http://www.google.com/patents/US20090222717. U.S
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://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EwPnOD8Qlpk. Streamed video of seminar held in 2007, University of Southampton, as part of 70th Birthday celebration Nelson TH (2011) Ted Nelson on the future of text, Milde Norway, October 2011. Streamed video. http://vimeo.com/31039323 Nelson TH (2012) Computers for cynics, May. Available via
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.youtube.com/channel/UCr_DXJ7ZUAJO_d8CnHYTDMQ. Streamed video. Eight-part series on topics in the history of computing Nelson TH (2013) Future of text 2013: Ted Nelson. Streamed video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SCoivDX3DFY&feature=youtube_gdata_player. From the Future of Text Symposium at the London College of Communication
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, London, England, 2013 Nelson TH (2013) Ted Nelson at HomeBrew computer club reunion 11-11-13. Streamed video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rbqPqp9y_lQ. Lecture at HomeBrew Computer Club reunion, 11
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November, Computer History Museum Nelson TH (2013) Ted Nelson’s eulogy for Douglas Engelbart. Streamed video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yMjPqr1s-cg. Given at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California
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. Mindful Press, Sausalito; distributed by Lulu.com. http://www.lulu.com/shop/theodor-holm-nelson/the-scene-machine/paperback/product-21454515.html Nelson TH (2014) Ted Nelson home page. http://ted.hyperland.com/. Accessed 19 Dec. Website includes “Curriculum Vitae: Theodor Holm Nelson, Ph.D,” http://hyperland.com/TNvita Part IV The
Possiplex
by Ted Nelson · 2 Jan 2010
an autobiography of Ted Nelson POSSIPLEX • Movies, Intellect, Creative Control, My Computer Life and the Fight for Civilization First edition, 2010 POSSIPLEX: Movies, Intellect, Creative Control, My Computer Life and
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sale method. The following are trademarks for designs still offered under consultation by the author: Fantasm™ Parallel Textface™ (broader generic: Transpointing windows) Walkie-Thinkie™ Retrocorder™ Ted Nelson’s JOT™ [not to be confused with ‘JOT’ offered by others] Cinenym™ HyperCoin™ SoftWorld™ LedgerDomain™ FlapDoodle™, Pictrola™ SpiralTime™ TRAC® is or was a registered trademark
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novel. In van Vogt’s Voyage of the Space Beagle, he defined a nexialist as 'someone who finds connections.' I typed up a business card Ted Nelson Nexialist and filed it. === 1951 (I was 13) The Night Camera One Went Out Just as the Mama show started one Friday night, Camera #1
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ran into Victor Navasky, editor of The Nation, also a Swarthmore alumnus, around 1997. He said, “Not THE Ted Nelson?” I politely waited to find out what that meant to him. “Not the Ted Nelson who published Nothing Magazine?” Ah, what an inner glow that gave me. In the following semester, my good friend
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. Deciding the details and finishing touches was what life was all about. I knew this would make it harder, but what the hell, I was Ted Nelson. I would not narrow down. That would be giving up and giving in. Cocteau, Whorf, Bucky I had very few living role models. I applauded
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years of my childhood, Theodor Holm II, but I knew it was too late; in college I had irrevocably become (i.e., become known as) Ted Nelson, and I figured that was who I had to stay. I had gone to Chicago in sociology because I didn’t want to be too
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taking. Schelling’s course, outside my Department, was one of my key Harvard learning experiences. The other is better known. Chapter 7. THE EPIPHANY OF TED NELSON In that first year at Harvard, 1960=1, I took a computer course, and my world exploded. What would Freed Bales have said? 1960 Freed
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thousand dollars worth of publicity!” he said. Unfortunately my partners didn’t think so. appealed to the Hobbiest. They didn’t think the poster/catalog Ted Nelson’s Softworld™: We Break with Itty Bitty (1975) The Itty Bitty operation was going in a very different direction, if any. I wanted to get
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months. He began having hallucinations. Once he thought we were underground together, and he shouted to an imaginary person: “You there! This is my grandson, Ted Nelson! You’ll be hearing more of him!” Another time he read strange poetry, apparently from a burning scroll that he saw in front of him
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years prior to the launch of the PC would be a harbinger of the future for me. In 1977, I had the pleasure of meeting Ted Nelson. I was so impressed with him that I invited him to speak at an IBM executive team meeting where I was hoping to garner support
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I had been with a long time denounced my work as creating a system for ‘passive viewing’—totally the opposite of what Xanadu was about. Ted Nelson’s Softworld™: The Story Ends (~1978) William had done an excellent version of TRAC. I was going to call our version SuperLanguage™. Personal Systems TECH
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in Houston. Roger Gregory marched me up to Robert A. Heinlein. He was a short man with a mustache. 'I'd like you to meet Ted Nelson,' said Roger. 'He wants to create a worldwide network of connected documents people can access from computer screens.' Heinlein looked at me with interest. "How
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them on line. Waiting for His Time to Come A friend of mine reported to me an interesting conversation. Someone asked a woman, ‘What’s Ted Nelson doing in San Antonio?’ She answered knowingly, “Waiting for his time to come.” I wish I knew who she was. Datapoint kept me on for
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. 1987 When Microsoft published a revised Computer Lib—an edition that still makes me deeply unhappy—they solicited comments from various people. Stewart Brand said: ‘Ted Nelson is the Thomas Paine of the computer revolution.’ I kind of liked that; I had admired Paine since highschool. But the remark makes me just
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but extremely simple-minded, which helps get things done. (People are smart in different ways.) Here is what he wrote in Weaving the Web (1999)— “Ted Nelson, a professional visionary,1 wrote in 1965 of "Literary 2 Machines," computers that would enable people to write and publish in a new, nonlinear format
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mankind. ‡ A repetitive work ordeal, a torment of ponderous repetition-- like the labor of Sisyphus, forever rolling a big rock back uphill. “Then there’s Ted Nelson” is a phrase lecturers use, trying to fit me into other narratives. But I don’t fit in those other narratives. I WAS HERE FIRST
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a vast amount of money, but we will never know. • What about the 1992 collapse of Xanadu at Autodesk, you ask? Weren’t they backing Ted Nelson? No. Autodesk invested, not in my projects, but in the company founded by Roger Gregory-- XOC, Inc.-- which had a president, a board of directors
Tools for Thought: The History and Future of Mind-Expanding Technology
by Howard Rheingold · 14 May 2000 · 352pp · 120,202 words
can learn about flying a spaceship or surviving in the desert or being a blue whale by experiencing space-desert-whale simulated microworlds in person. Ted Nelson is a dropout, gadfly, and self-proclaimed genius who self-published Computer Lib, the best-selling underground manifesto of the microcomputer revolution. His dream of
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prophet who saw the implications of Sketchpad and other heretofore esoteric wonders of personal computing was an irreverent, unorthodox, counterculture fellow by the name of Ted Nelson, who has long been in the habit of self-publishing quirky, cranky, amazingly accurate commentaries on the future of computing. In The Home Computer Revolution
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the next chapter, we'll look at yet another path -- one that is more connected to the history of literature than the history of machines. Ted Nelson, our final infonaut, envisions a future in which the entire population joins the grand conversation of human culture that has heretofore been restricted to those
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as well have been called an Oogabooga Box. That way, at least, we could get the fear out in the open and laugh at it." Ted Nelson is one of the most outrageous and probably the funniest of the infonauts. Of pronouncements like the one quoted above, he likes to say, " If
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first billions. They all have what they need to materialize the tools and toys they have dreamed about for decades. Ted Nelson's fortunes, have not (yet) turned out so spectacularly. What Ted Nelson and his long-suffering associate Roger Gregory have now is a long program written in the "C" language -- a program
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that is either a future goldmine for Ted Nelson and a boon to all humankind, or yet another crackpot boondoggle on the fringes of computer history. Unsettled as his future might be, what he
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had in the past was the foresight, the orneriness, and the tenacity to talk clearly and plainly about the computer empire's new clothes. Ted Nelson was another one of the few people who saw the personal augmentation potential of computers early in the game and grasped the significance of the
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which turned out to be strikingly accurate, a few of which turned out to be bad guesses. As a forecaster in a notoriously unpredictable field, Ted Nelson has done better than most -- at forecasting. His business and scholarly ventures have yet to meet with success in either the academic establishment or the
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struggle, or leave him penniless, thereby branding him as a bona fide crank instead of a late-blooming visionary. Like so many other computer prodigies, Ted Nelson started his often lonely and always stubbornly unique intellectual journey when he first realized what they were trying to do to him in school. "I
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known anyone who hated school as much as I did, although my assumption is that other dropouts do." Despite his repeated clashes with educational authorities, Ted Nelson managed to establish himself as an "extreme loony on campus" at Swarthmore , in the late 1950s, a place and an era where extreme loonies were
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tolerate intellectual arrogance as long as it was accompanied by near-genius originality. In the fall of 1960, during his second year of graduate school, Ted Nelson found out about computers, and not a moment too soon. He was drowning in his own information, carrying around an already monumental collection of barely
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all? Why not just store every variation on everything and let the computer take care of sifting through it when we want to view something? Ted Nelson was hooked, and desperately wanted to become a "computer person," but came up against the still-prevalent notion that computers are "mathematical." Never one to
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the wholly voluntary efforts of teenagers with modems, traveling business people with briefcase telecomputers, information utilities, computer bulletin board systems, and telecommunes of every stripe. Ted Nelson is voicing what a few people have known for a while, from the technical side -- that the intersection of communication and computer technologies will create
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to adopt might have less to do with picking the most likely successors to today's institutions than with encouraging an atmosphere of experimentation. Is Ted Nelson any crazier than Alan Turing? Did Gutenberg think about the effects of public libraries? Hints to the shape of the emerging order can be gleaned
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be seen reflected in the shapes of the imaginal cells of the information culture -- from eight-year-olds with fantasy amplifiers to knowledge engineers, from Ted Nelson to Murray Turoff, from Clyde Ghost Monster to Sourcevoid Dave, from ARPA to ORIGINS. The flights of the infonauts are not the end of the
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Interface: An Overview," in Office Systems Technology (El Segundo, Calif.: Xerox Corporation, 1982). [9] Ibid., 25. Chapter Eleven: The Birth of the Fantasy Amplifier [1] Ted Nelson, The Home Computer Revolution (self-published, 1977), 120-123. [2] Michael Schrage, "Alan Kay's Magical Mystery Tour," TWA Ambassador, January 1984, 36. [3] Seymour
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., p. 19. [13] Ibid., p.22. Chapter Fourteen: Xanadu, Network Culture, and Beyond [1] Ted Nelson, Dream Machines/Computer Lib (self-published, 1974). [2] Ted Nelson, Literary Machines (self-published, 1983). [3] Ibid., 1/17. [4] Ibid., 1/18. [5] Ted Nelson, "A New Home For the Mind," Datamation, March 1982, 174. [6] Ibid., 180. [7
Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution - 25th Anniversary Edition
by Steven Levy · 18 May 2010 · 598pp · 183,531 words
Nelson. Buck-toothed, diminutive, but fiery AI lab hacker who connected the PDP-1 computer to hack the phone system. Later cofounded Systems Concepts company. Ted Nelson. Self-described “innovator” and noted curmudgeon who self-published the influential Computer Lib book. Russell Noftsker. Harried administrator of MIT AI lab in late sixties
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fill up with a virtual who’s who of alternative computing in Northern California. Of the distinguished visitors dropping in, none was so welcome as Ted Nelson. Nelson was the self-published author of Computer Lib, the epic of the computer revolution, the bible of the hacker dream. He was stubborn enough
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to publish it when no one else seemed to think it was a good idea. Ted Nelson had a self-diagnosed ailment of being years ahead of his time. Son of actress Celeste Holm and director Ralph Nelson (”Lilies of the Field
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, and manically amateurish drawings. The book was in two parts: one was called “Computer Lib,” the computer world according to Ted Nelson; and the other, “Dream Machines,” the computer future according to Ted Nelson. Shelling out two thousand dollars out of pocket—“a lot to me,” he would say later—he printed a few
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had its cult following. At PCC, Computer Lib was one more reason to believe it would soon be no secret that computers were magic. And Ted Nelson was treated like royalty at potluck dinners. But people were not coming to potluck dinners to see the wizards of the computer revolution: they were
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much bigger than that. Every day, it seemed, new things appeared to make it even clearer that the computer revolution had occurred right there. Even Ted Nelson, author of Computer Lib, called with his blessing. Bob Albrecht also called, and said he’d write a book about games on the Altair, if
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turned off by the technical ferocity of the discussions, the intense flame that burned brightest when people directed themselves to the hacker pursuit of building. Ted Nelson, author of Computer Lib, came to a meeting and was confused by all of it, later calling the scruffily dressed and largely uncombed Homebrew people
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the fortnightly highlight in the lives of well over a hundred hard-core Brewers. What they had started was almost a crusade now, something that Ted Nelson, whose book was filled with anti-IBM screeds, should have appreciated. While IBM and the Big Guys never gave a thought to these random hackers
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on the public-address system and announced the attendance—the weekend’s total was almost thirteen thousand. He was immediately followed by Computer Lib author Ted Nelson, feeling no doubt like a once lonesome guru who in one fell swoop was united with a sea of disciples. “This is Captain Kirk,” Nelson
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the Community Memory movement, Tom Pittman on computer languages, Bob Kahn on the Lawrence Hall of Science computing program, Marc LeBrun on computer music, and Ted Nelson on the triumphant future. Nelson was one of the keynote speakers at a banquet held at the nearby St. Francis Hotel. The name of his
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manufacturing publicity machine will go ape. American society will go out of its gourd. And the next two years will be unforgettable. Chapter 13. Secrets Ted Nelson’s speech was not the crazed outburst of a planner overdosing on large-scale integration. The unforgettable next two years were indeed marked by unprecedented
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tortures and complete frontal lobotomies, almost, to anyone leaking the name of the three-initial company or its plans. The predictions of Computer Lib author Ted Nelson and others that the personal computer revolution would put IBM “in disarray” had proven a pathetic underestimation of the monolithic firm. The Hulking Giant of
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, 1973). Chapter 8 Back issues of PCC, generously provided by Bob Albrecht, were particularly helpful for information about early seventies Bay Area hacking. Chapter 8 Ted Nelson, Computer Lib/Dream Machines (self-published, distributed by The Distributors, South Bend, Ind., 1974). Chapter 8 Brautigan’s poem is in The Pill Versus the
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Lipkin, David Lubar, Olaf Lubeck, John McCarthy, John McKenzie, Robert Maas, Patricia Mariott, Bob Marsh, Roger Melen, Jude Milhon, Marvin Minsky, Fred Moore, Stewart Nelson, Ted Nelson, Jim Nitchals, Russ Noftsker, Kenneth Nussbacher, Rob O’Neal, Peter Olyphant, Adam Osborne, Bill Pearson, Tom Pittman, Larry Press, Malcolm Rayfield, Robert Reiling, Randy Rissman
Memory Machines: The Evolution of Hypertext
by Belinda Barnet · 14 Jul 2013 · 193pp · 19,478 words
-by-blow report of how hypertext happened, how we blundered to the World Wide Web, and what other things electronic literature might still become. Congratulations!’ —Ted Nelson, hypertext pioneer ‘This is a fine and important book, the first to capture the rich history of ideas and people that led to the World
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data, and of how these ideas and data may be stored and published […] this new way of handling information is to represent its true interconnections. —Ted Nelson, Literary Machines CONTENTS Foreword To Mandelbrot in Heaven Stuart Moulthrop Preface Chapter 1. Technical Evolution ix xix 1 Chapter 2. Memex as an Image of
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wasn’t the point with which Nelson took issue). More than many other things, this performance introduced me to hypermedia polemics, academic theater, and the Ted Nelson experience. Two decades later, my partner and I still recite Ted’s line, as if it * Xanadu is a registered trademark of Theodor H. Nelson
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Congress looking for interesting correspondence; time to interview Doug Engelbart and feel embarrassingly starstruck; and time to travel to Keio University in Japan to meet Ted Nelson. I also had time to ponder how it all might fit together, and more deeply, if it is even possible to say that a technical
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could or should be. I will define precisely what I mean by the word hypertext in the next chapter, but for now we will use Ted Nelson’s popular definition, branching and responding text, best read at a computer screen (Nelson 1993). The first hypertext systems were deep and richly connected, and
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Web. It was built by Wendy Hall, Gary Hill PREFACE xxiii and Hugh Davis at the University of Southampton, and influenced by the ideas of Ted Nelson. As Wendy Hall put it to me: Microcosm started out as a research system. But we did commercialise it. We launched the company – then called
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case, I take full credit and full responsibility. I should also point out that he wouldn’t consider himself a pioneer in the league of Ted Nelson or Andy van Dam or Wendy Hall – more a ‘Storyspace groupie’, as he put it to me. I disagree. But we’ll get to that
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in the final chapter, a chapter he argued quite convincingly for me to include. I would also like to thank Ted Nelson, who first set aside a chunk of time to speak to me in Japan in 1999, and then came to stay with us in Melbourne
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, Dr Darren Tofts, Lisa Gye and Dr Esther Milne. Professor Julian Thomas from the Institute for Social Research (ISR) at Swinburne was instrumental in bringing Ted Nelson to Australia. Many of these chapters first appeared as articles in academic journals. Chapter 2, on Vannevar Bush and Memex, and Chapter 5, on HES
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tracing of any particular series of states or outputs. (Wardrip-Fruin 2011, 302) To define the ‘operations and processes’ behind hypertext as an information system, Ted Nelson is the logical first port of call. His original 1965 definition of hypertext was ‘a body of written or pictorial material interconnected in such a
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true interconnections’ that interpenetrate literature and human knowledge. Each of the hypertext systems we investigate here has a different interpretation of what that means. As Ted Nelson has said in numerous places (first in Computer Lib, and also to me in 2011), ‘Everyone who builds software is projecting the back of their
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, unanswered questions and unbuilt devices that they view as their agenda for five years, ten years, and longer.’ Memex has never been built, but like Ted Nelson’s Xanadu, it has become an image of potentiality for hypertext. It has also had a formative role in information science. The social and cultural
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refer to here (for example, his autobiography, Pieces of the Action, published in 1970) had historical influence. Inventors like Doug Engelbart, Andy van Dam and Ted Nelson did not read the other pieces I cite here until James Nyce and Paul Kahn published their landmark 1991 book, From Memex to Hypertext, which
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[1945] 1991, 107), just as though these items were being ‘gathered together from widely separated sources and bound together to form a new book’ (104). Ted Nelson noted in response to this chapter that items could be put on more than one trail – they could be reused (Nelson calls this ‘tranclusion’, a
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encouraging the public that ‘the time has come to try it again’ (ibid.). In 1968, Bush received a phone call from a young man called Ted Nelson, who was visiting the area for a conference. Nelson told Bush he had started work on a computer-based system that had a lot in
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’ (Engelbart 1988, 190), but he wrote the paper in 1962 and published it in 1963. It is interesting to note here that both Engelbart and Ted Nelson found writing difficult; they were far from prolific, and would draft and redraft multiple times. In Nelson’s case this frustration was largely with the
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PARC and influenced all future hypertext systems. The premature death of a technical project like this is not uncommon. We will see it again in Ted Nelson’s legendary project, Xanadu, and we saw it in Memex’s failure to translate into technical vision. These visionary systems failed at different times and
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OF LITERARY MEMORY: XANADU What I thought would be called Xanadu is called the World Wide Web and works differently, but has the same penetration. —Ted Nelson, 1999 It was a vision in a dream. A computer filing system that would store and deliver the great body of human literature, in all
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not an attempt to write a linear, causally linked history; interested readers can find that story elsewhere.5 It is also not the story of Ted Nelson’s life. He published his autobiography, Possiplex, in 2010. I am interested in Nelson’s vision and the impact of that vision. The remarkable thing
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and lucid dreaming, but Xanadu has nonetheless become the most important vision in the history of computing. THE MAGICAL PLACE OF LITERARY MEMORY: XANADU 69 Ted Nelson at Keio University, Japan 1999. Photo © Belinda Barnet. Ideas and Their Interconnections: The Evolution of the Idea People ask me why I carry a stapler
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LITERARY MEMORY: XANADU 73 Vassar College Lecture Invitation, 1965. This was the first time Nelson’s word hypertext (or ‘hypertexts’) appeared in public. Thanks to Ted Nelson for permission to republish. Crucially, the design also got him published. The word ‘hypertext’ appeared in print for the first time in 1965 after Nelson
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sketch of the interior, complete with a snack bar and jingles. It was a whimsical idea, but it predicted the domestic penetration of ISPs and Ted Nelson with the author, 2010. Photo © data portals in what would eventually Belinda Barnet. become the Web. Sceptical readers, Stuart Moulthrop writes, might see in this
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to the bookshelf. In this chapter I trace the development of two important hypertext systems built at Brown: the Hypertext Editing System (HES), codesigned by Ted Nelson and van Dam and developed by van Dam’s students, and the File Retrieval and Editing System (FRESS), designed by van Dam and his students
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van Dam’s leadership, and Intermedia, developed under Norman Meyrowitz’s leadership (Meyrowitz would go on to be president of Macromedia Inc.). 92 Memory Machines Ted Nelson was codesigner of HES, and his ideas about hypertext inspired the HES project in the first place; van Dam credited Nelson for this contribution both
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people ‘who were brave or foolish enough to sign up’ for this suite of subjects (Lloyd 2011), so he did something very clever. He introduced Ted Nelson at an introductory lecture. Ted proceeded to do what I call Ted and Andy’s Medicine Show. Very dramatic, so, essentially just spotlights shining down
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a point of departure in one area (signified by an asterisk) to an entrance point in another, or the same, area. The HES team used Ted Nelson’s concept of a hypertext link (though from Nelson’s perspective they ‘flattened’ this by making the jumps one-way). Doug Engelbart was incorporating the
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physicists were treating the computer as their private fiefdom [did I] get the money. (van Dam 1999) The FRESS team kept going. Engelbart kept going. Ted Nelson kept writing and publishing and inspiring audiences of young hackers and bright-eyed alumni. And slowly, very slowly, the computing community began to realize that
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how stories are told – with ‘how we make meaning, as if a caress’ (Joyce 2004, 45). The metaphor of water is an appropriate one. Like Ted Nelson, who had his first epiphany about the nature of ideas and the connections between them as he trailed his hand in the water under his
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‘we all knew systems that had a good deal more functionality, like FRESS, and we sort of resented being told, “here’s hypertext”’ (Joyce 2011a). Ted Nelson also presented a paper on Xanadu (‘All for One and One for All’) and Janet Walker presented a paper on the Document Examiner. ‘It was
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room, lots of big systems, systems we’d been reading about for years but that you’d never actually seen before. There in one room: Ted Nelson’s Xanadu, Engelbart’s NLS/Augment, Walker’s Symbolics Document Explorer, Joyce and Bolter with Storyspace, [Bernstein’s] Hypergate, Meyrowitz and Landow and Yankelovich and
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. Every item had to have a section header, and underneath that would be some text, and underneath that some subtext. This imposed structure would repel Ted Nelson, who declined an offer from Engelbart to work on the project. It also distinguishes the system from Xanadu, which is opposed to such structures. But
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use. NLS was never intended to connect literally billions of people together like the Web. At around the same time Engelbart was building NLS, however, Ted Nelson was designing a system that was intended to do just that. It was worldwide hypertext, like the Web. It was called Xanadu. Xanadu would be
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to the author, Bush and Engelbart are expressing their feelings and intuition, not their knowledge. Chapter 3. Augmenting the Intellect: NLS 1 Interestingly, so was Ted Nelson, who said in one of our interviews that he only recently found out that Engelbart was also deeply inspired by Whorf. Bardini, however, recalls that
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communication. Moulthrop, Stuart. 2011b. Interview with the author. Nelson, Theodor Holm. 1999a. Interview with the author. . 2010a. Email to Wendy Hall and Ruth Simmons from Ted Nelson, 26 February 2010, obtained by permission. . 2011. Interview with the author. . 2012. Comments on the manuscript. Smith, John B. 2011. Interview with the author. Simpson
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on Hypertext March 16–20, 1996, Washington, DC, edited by David Stotts, 85–92. New York: ACM. Gregory, Roger. 2010. ‘Interviewed by Dave Marvit at Ted Nelson Book Launch, 8 October’. Online: http://www.archive.org/details/possiplexrogergregoryinterview (accessed March 2012). Guattari, Félix. 1995. Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm. Sydney: Power Publications
Bootstrapping: Douglas Engelbart, Coevolution, and the Origins of Personal Computing (Writing Science)
by Thierry Bardini · 1 Dec 2000
of the people who told me their stories: Don Andrews, Bob Belleville, Peter Deutsch, Bill English, Charles Irby, Alan Kay, Butler Lampson, Harvey Leht- man, Ted Nelson, George Pake, Jeff Rulifson, Dave Smith, Robert Taylor, Keith Uncapher, Jacques Vallee, "Smokey" Wallace, and Jim Warren. Thank you all, and I sincerely hope that
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" (Halasz 1988, 836). Because of how he conceived of the way that natural language could function in the human-computer interface, Douglas Engelbart, along with Ted Nelson, often is credited for pioneering work in the field of hypertext or hypermedia. Many, however, trace the genealogy of hy- pertext not to Engelbart and
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conceived as a medium, only as a personal "tool" for information retrieval. Personal ac- cess to information was emphasized over communication. The later research of Ted Nelson on hypertext is very representative of that emphasis. 4 It is problematic, however, to grant Bush the status of the "unique forefa- ther" of computerized
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mean, and there were in fact two different approaches to communication at the origin of current hypertext and hypermedia systems. The first is represented by Ted Nelson and his Xanadu Project, which was aiming at facilitating individual literary creativity. The second is represented by Douglas Engelbart and his NLS, as his oN
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contrast, tends to be limited, and "possibly possessing a yet un- studied arrangement of its own," often is structured, even hierarchical, and susceptible to rearrangement. Ted Nelson, who like Engelbart (1992) told me that he was very familiar with Whorf's writings, stressed that the main dif- ference between his views and
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the author) '" .....:_ . :oI; ,. . - \ "". . . ..,.:." ," .- . ' , . - . ., . ; >4;;:" ; - . , .!I"f : . I ' .." .:" .": ..::." ". '.' u.... .' . :;. ... . . . . ::, ' , " -.'- '-' " . ---..!j r to I ! I ," I , " ,', ,, ull "" i ". ....;\. ..;. "iV.- ....-; ..;. . . ., , 0'" ".....: ... '. " , ... 0'. 'Ii;. 4- "- .. -""\.. "" 'It -r I " '\. ? (; \ , ,) !k ,/' ,"< "&. : Ted Nelson, 1993. (Photo by the author) CHAPTER SIX The Arrival of the Real User and the Beginning of the End The HIstory of every major Galactic
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INTERNET ARPANET N SFN ET W E B B IT:'\JI:T FlD( ):'\JET FIgure C- I. The Genesis of the Personal Interface. individual. As Ted Nelson, the conceptual inventor of hypertext, puts it, "The virtuality of a thing is what it seems to be, rather than its reality, the technical or
Cataloging the World: Paul Otlet and the Birth of the Information Age
by Alex Wright · 6 Jun 2014
Turing; networking visionaries like Vinton G. Cerf and Robert E. Kahn; as well as hypertext seers like Vannevar Bush, J. C. R. Licklider, Douglas Engelbart, Ted Nelson, and of course Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau, who in 1991 released their first version of the World Wide Web. The dominant influence of
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of human perception—such as sound, taste, and even smell—blending into a state of “hyper-documentation”30 (a term he coined thirty years before Ted Nelson’s more famous neologism of “hypertext”). In a passage that would make the editors of Wired blush, he described the possibility of achieving “a pure
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individualism and personal liberation. His particular style of utopianism drew him more toward the universal than the individualistic. Otlet’s closest intellectual cousin might be Ted Nelson, in whom the idealistic ethos of the 1960s computer counterculture found its fullest expression. A gifted and iconoclastic thinker, Nelson built on the ideas of
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would allow the center’s researchers to share information with each other more easily. Berners-Lee has freely admitted that his ideas were influenced by Ted Nelson; he had also immersed himself in the increasingly active hypertext research community of the late 1980s. In his 1989 proposal to his manager at CERN
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a hypertext movement that had grown up in the computer science world of the 1980s. In his initial paper he mentioned the pioneering work of Ted Nelson, as well as the many contributions of researchers involved in two hypertext conferences in 1987 and 1988. Another hypertext pioneer, Andy van Dam, had been
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strong echoes in contemporary literature about the Internet. While the trippy liberation ethos—one might even say theology—of early visionaries like Stewart Brand and Ted Nelson may seem a far cry from the orderly, World Government orientation of Otlet and his fellow belle epoque thinkers, they share a common belief in
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2 – 2 7 3 6. Cerf, Dalal, and Sunshine, “Specification of Internet Transmission Control Program.” 7. WWW Consortium, “General Overview.” 8. Contemporary Web critics like Ted Nelson have pointed out that despite its foundational rhetoric about openness, the Web does indeed rely on hierarchical file and directory structures—like XML (which Nelson
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Dormouse Said, 148–50. 16. Kesey, as quoted in ibid., 165. 17. Brand, “Spacewar: Fanatic Life and Symbolic Death among the Computer Bums.” 18. Nelson, “Ted Nelson Specs.” 19. Nelson, Possiplex, 100–101. 20. Ibid., 36. 21. Van den Heuvel, private correspondence. 22. Nelson, Literary Machines 93.1, 2. 23. Nelson, “File
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. Sausalito, Calif.: Mindful Press, 1993. ———. Possiplex: Movies, Intellect, Creative Control, My Computer Life and the Fight for Civilization: An Autobiography of Ted Nelson. Sausalito, Calif.: Mindful Press, 2010. 330 BIBLIOGRAPHY ———. “Ted Nelson Specs,” n.d. http://hyperland.com/mlawLeast.html. Neurath, Otto, and Marie Neurath. Empiricism and Sociology: With a Selection of Biographical and
What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry
by John Markoff · 1 Jan 2005 · 394pp · 108,215 words
Engelbart—with a small group of people who had once worked for him: Bill and Roberta English and Bill and Ann Duvall. Also present was Ted Nelson, an itinerant writer, inventor, and social scientist who can best be described as the Don Quixote of computing. Nelson was a contemporary of Engelbart in
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. The confrontation between the two men was remarkable, because the previous year van Dam had begun developing a similar system at Brown in collaboration with Ted Nelson, the itinerant poet-sociologist who had a vision that in many ways paralleled Engelbart’s. Now van Dam was stunned to find that Engelbart’s
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finished he decided that he had no interest in going through the process again, whatever the benefits. McCarthy came to view both Engelbart’s and Ted Nelson’s ideas on text editing and hypertext as too dictatorial. He decided structure was imposing an unnecessary restriction on his thought process. The structure imposed
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had found his milieu. Later, he would assert that while he was a student at Swarthmore he had coauthored the first rock musical, in 1957. Ted Nelson had also studied with the conservative Harvard sociologist Talcott Parsons. At that time, he discovered computers and independently hit upon some of the same ideas
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with the IBM PC, which would make him quite wealthy. Later, having squandered his fortune, he found himself homeless. For a while he worked with Ted Nelson at Autodesk, an early PC software company. Years later, during the dotcom boom, he did pioneering website design while on the Goa coast in India
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both work and play, transformed the entire American economy. Moore’s pursuit of democracy and community proved to be more than a footnote, however. With Ted Nelson’s computing-power-to-the-people rallying cry echoing across the landscape, the hobbyists would tear down the glass-house computing world and transform themselves
Track Changes
by Matthew G. Kirschenbaum · 1 May 2016 · 519pp · 142,646 words
configuration of the universal machine that is a modern digital computer. The technorati have often shown surprising disdain for word processing on exactly these grounds. Ted Nelson, for example, visionary author of the book Literary Machines (1980) and founder of the Xanadu project, has frequently inveighed against programs like WordStar and Word
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, had gotten written. Entitled Without Me You’re Nothing (1980), it is one of the more intriguing artifacts of its era, more in line with Ted Nelson’s visionary Computer Lib / Dream Machines (1974) than the innumerable other home computer guidebooks soon to be on the market. The cryptic title was meant
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Dam, a Brown University computer scientist who since 1967 had been independently working on his own screen editing systems, in partnership with fellow computer pioneer, Ted Nelson. Their collaboration was to prove fraught, with Nelson departing Brown the following year.8 Van Dam had always emphasized the importance of being able to
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before the group from Apple, a young Hollywood screenwriter named Bonnie MacBird showed up. She had an unusual background: she had read about PARC in Ted Nelson’s book Computer Lib / Dream Machines (1974) and had studied with Donald Knuth, one of the world’s foremost computer scientists, at Stanford. She was
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1967; it was certainly one of the very earliest CRT-based text editors, more or less contemporaneous with the initial experiments of Andy van Dam, Ted Nelson, and Douglas Englebart. It would go on to spawn a number of derivatives, notably the so-called RAND editor, and NED (New Editor, also eponymous
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is based on Heilmann’s PhD thesis and spans the history of word processing at large, but with no particular emphasis on the literary. 63. Ted Nelson, Geeks Bearing Gifts: How the Computer World Got This Way: Version 1.1 (Sausalito, CA: Mindful Press, 2009), 128. 64. Jay David Bolter, Writing Space
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author. 31. Tesler, interview with the author. 32. Ibid. 33. Ibid. 34. Ibid. The same story is also recounted from personal correspondence with Tesler in Ted Nelson, Geeks Bearing Gifts: How the Computer World Got This Way; Version 1.1 (Sausalito, CA: Mindful Press, 2009), 128. 35. Quotations are from a copy
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Fallows, Sheila Finch, Robert Foothorap, William Gibson, Kenneth Goldsmith, Eileen Gunn, Ellenor Handley, David Hartwell, Susanne Holl, William Loizeaux, Barry Longyear, Bonnie MacBird, Bradford Morgan, Ted Nelson, Larry Niven, Michael Ondaatje, Michael Pietsch, Jerry Pournelle, Richard Powers, Timothy Reiss, Peter Rinearson, Seymour Rubinstein, Jeanne Sheldon, Charles Simonyi, Steve Soboroff, Bruce Sterling, Peter
Fire in the Valley: The Birth and Death of the Personal Computer
by Michael Swaine and Paul Freiberger · 19 Oct 2014 · 459pp · 140,010 words
, and would also run afoul of some of the errors that personal-computer companies still struggle with today. After Altair Everybody wanted to be second. –Ted Nelson, computer visionary, philosopher, and critic During the two and a half years between the January 1975 Popular Electronics cover story announcing the Altair 8800 and
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informality and tongue-in-cheek humor of the hobbyist movement. Lee Felsenstein started a company called Loving Grace Cybernetics and later another called Golemics Incorporated. Ted Nelson’s Itty-Bitty Machine Company, a sly play on IBM, appeared in Evanston, Illinois. Chicken Delight Computer Consultants cropped up in New Jersey. Kentucky Fried
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Whole Earth Catalog, under the orchestration of Stewart Brand, with its emphasis on access to tools. This, in turn, inspired actress Celeste Holm’s son Ted Nelson to write a book similar in spirit but about access to computers. Nelson’s Computer Lib proclaimed, well before the Altair was announced, “You can
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’s band Big Brother and the Holding Company was a company. * * * Figure 29. Computer Lib and Dream Machines “You can and must understand computers NOW,” Ted Nelson’s Computer Lib proclaimed. To Homebrewers it was the manifesto of the revolution. The second half of Computer Lib was printed upside down and had
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its own front cover. (Courtesy of Ted Nelson) Albrecht was a passionate promoter of computer power to the people. He wanted to teach children, in particular, about the machines. So, he split off
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, which had the bright and mirthful air of its somewhat rumpled and clever editor. ROM offered regular contributions from iconoclasts such as Lee Felsenstein and Ted Nelson, and a “chipcake” centerfold of the droid R2D2. This crop of magazines spread the word about microcomputing and enabled hobbyists in the most far-flung
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news organ Computer Notes. By the time the event took place in March, several hundred people turned out. Among the speakers was Computer Lib author Ted Nelson, who delivered a scandalous and wildly entertaining speech on what he called “psycho-acoustic dildonics.” Lee Felsenstein (of Homebrew Computer Club, Community Memory project, and
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were the Homebrew Computer Club, the Southern California Computer Society, PCC, and the Stanford Electrical Engineering Department. Science-fiction writer Frederick Pohl spoke, as did Ted Nelson, Lee Felsenstein, Carl Helmers, and David Ahl. Everyone agreed it was a gas. * * * Figure 50. Lyall Morrill and Bill Baker Early software entrepreneurs Lyall Morrill
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outlet in Bloomington, Indiana. He also helped start the Chicago-based Itty-Bitty Machine Company, an ill-fated venture that was conceived during conversations with Ted Nelson at the World Altair Computer Convention. With computer stores opening across the country, countertop sales had clearly started to elbow aside mail order. At computer
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other machines. All in all, the Computer Faire was a big success for Apple. Everyone seemed to like the Apple II, although Computer Lib author Ted Nelson complained that it displayed only uppercase letters. Woz couldn’t resist playing one of his practical jokes. MITS was absent from the show, and with
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, in 1945. Bush’s essay, which envisioned information-processing technology as an extension of human intellect, inspired two of the most influential thinkers in computing, Ted Nelson and Douglas Engelbart, who each labored in his own way to articulate Bush’s sketchy vision of an interconnected world of knowledge. Key to both
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media. Since the earliest days of personal computing, the online element of it had been at least in part about community. This online community, which Ted Nelson had called “the future intellectual home of mankind” in Computer Lib, Lee Felsenstein was working to build through projects like Community Memory. Later, online systems
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product for which their friends told them there was no market; Mike Markkula backing two kids in a garage—dreamers all. And then there was Ted Nelson, the ultimate crazy dreamer, envisioning a new world and spending a lifetime trying to bring it to life. In one way or another, they were
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