B004R9Q09U EBOK (32 page)

Engelbart’s vision also inspired any number of people outside the mainstream computer industry: people like Stewart Brand, a former Merry Prankster who would go on to found the distinctly hypertext-like Whole Earth Catalog and Whole Earth Review, whose
alumni Kevin Kelly and Howard Rheingold would go on to play instrumental roles in the early days of the
Wired
era. Paradoxically, the staid, buttoned-down, military-funded Engelbart found his greatest following in the burgeoning 1960s counterculture. Over the coming years, Engelbart’s influence would reverberate throughout the grassroots computer movement that would ultimately unleash the PC revolution.

In the mid-1960s a young Harvard sociology student named Ted Nelson took his first computer class. He was fascinated by the first-generation computing machines but found the emerging discipline of computer science profoundly dissatisfying. At the time, academic computing was strictly the province of mathematicians, logisticians, and scientists. With a few notable exceptions like Harvard’s pioneering Russian-English machine translation project, humanists rarely ventured anywhere near the things. It was a far cry from Bush’s vision of an individualized computing experience modeled after the human brain. In the early days of academic computing, mathematicians ran the show.

Soon after he encountered the Harvard computer labs, Nelson started to harbor a gut feeling that the computer scientists had it all wrong. They insisted on approaching computers as glorified calculators. To Nelson, an idealistic young social scientist, a computer “was not a mechanical, a numerical device, it was not a mathematical device, it was not an engineering device, it was an all-purpose machine! … Computer was a bad name for it. It might just as well have been called an oogabooga box.”
³¹

At Harvard, Nelson discovered the germ of an impulse that would propel him into a lifelong pitched battle against the dominant institutional forces of the computer industry. In 1965, he wrote an academic paper entitled “A File Structure for the Complex, the Changing and the Indeterminate.” In that paper, he coined a term that has lasted: “hypertext.” Nelson would later write, “By ‘hypertext,’ I mean nonsequential writing—text that branches and allows choices to the reader, best read at an interactive screen. As popularly conceived, this
is a series of text chunks connected by links which offer the reader different pathways.”
³²
That paper voiced his earliest inklings of a new kind of computing environment designed not for computer scientists but for readers and writers.

Known today as the conceptual father of hypertext, Nelson has spent most of his career on the fringe of academic respectability (a position he still enjoys today). A self-described “rogue intellectual,” operating mostly outside the mainstream of universities and the computer industry, he nonetheless enjoyed an influential following among a small cult of early programmers.

Computer scientists Gillies and Cailliau describe Nelson as a Hitchcock-like figure. Just as the great director knew almost nothing about the technical details of filmmaking—he rarely even looked through the camera viewfinder—Nelson somehow managed to shape the course of the entire computer industry while knowing little about their technical operation.
³³
Perhaps it was his love of filmmaking that inspired Nelson to name his pet project “Xanadu,” just as Orson Welles had named the fictionalized Hearst Castle in
Citizen Kane
.
³⁴

As a child, Nelson remembers reading a magazine called
Flair
, a publication that featured “little doors and windows throughout the magazine you could pop through. You could open the door and you could see something on the next page,” he recalls. “I loved that! And so it was obvious that you could get around linearity in these ways but you were always limited physically. The mind could imagine much richer spaces.”
³⁵
For Nelson that childhood template helped guide his thinking about what networked information spaces could be.

Along with Engelbart, Nelson took inspiration from the vision Bush outlined in “As We May Think.” But while Engelbart pursued his ideas from within the institutional mainstream, Nelson worked on the fringes, assembling an ad hoc team of programmers to help bring his vision to fruition. Whereas Engelbart tailored his efforts toward teams collaborating on projects, Nelson was more interested in the solitary user. “The fundamental difference between my wonderful and very great stepfather Douglas Engelbart and myself,” Nelson says, “is that he wanted to empower working groups and I just wanted to be left alone and given the equipment and basically to empower smart individuals and keep them from being dragged down
by group stupidity.”
³⁶
In this sense, Nelson is a more direct descendant of Bush, who also advocated for a vision of individual-centered computing.

Nelson was (and is) a devout maverick, intent on shaking up institutional hierarchies with a vision of liberating the individual from suffocating organizational strictures. In Howard Bloom’s parlance, Nelson would qualify as a Diversity Generator, a free-wheeling change agent who relentlessly probed the boundaries of the status quo. Whereas Engelbart embraced the notion of hierarchy as the essential building block of his system, Nelson railed against hierarchies of all kinds. “From earliest youth I was suspicious of categories and hierarchies,” Nelson wrote, and in his books he railed against the establishment at every turn, dispensing vitriol at two favorite targets: the modern university and the computer industry. “If you are not falsely expecting a permanent system of categories or a permanent stable hierarchy, you realize your information system must then deal with an ever-changing flux of new categories, hierarchies and other arrangements which all have to coexist.”
³⁷

If Engelbart’s ideas were a revelation, Nelson’s were a revolution. Excoriating the soul-crushing effects of a modern university system that “imbues in everyone the attitude that the world is divided into ‘subjects’; that these subjects are well-defined and well-understood; and that there are ‘basics,’ that is, a hierarchy of understandings.”
³⁸
He dismissed professors as “feudal lords” (the Duchess of History, the Count of Mathematics) and went on to vent much of his literary spleen against what he perceived as the professional class of the computer industry. He argued that technologists had created an insular culture for themselves, forming a “polite conspiracy” with humanists based on what he considered a faulty understanding of what computers really were. “Their shared false notion of computers is that they are Inhuman, Oppressive, Cold, Relentless; and that they somehow Reduce Everything to Mathematics.”
³⁹
Nelson’s aim was to liberate computers from the back office and to transform the whole understanding of what computers were. In this aim, it must be allowed, the computer industry has effectively thwarted his efforts.

Like a latter-day Ruskin, Nelson railed against the central system
orientation that then pervaded the computer industry (and, many would argue, still does), with its growing layers of professional specialization. Nelson objected vehemently to the emergence of a “priesthood” with a “punch card mentality” that asserted its dominion over the new field with increasing layers of specialist vocabulary, relentlessly excluding nonspecialists, a phenomenon he deemed “the creeping evil of Professionalism, the control of aspects of society by cliques of insiders.” Nelson sets out to demystify—and debunk—the institutional computer industry, laying out his new vision of computing centered around the individual, not the organization. Nelson christened himself a “systems humanist.”

His books, notably
Computer Lib
,
Dream Machines
, and its sequel
Literary Machines,
have in retrospect taken on a visionary glow. But at the time they went all but ignored among mainstream scholars and the computer industry. In keeping with his revolutionary ideals, Nelson wrote in an over-the-top style, employing a mishmash of exotic metaphors, kinetic drawings, and occasionally vituperative diatribes against mainstream institutions that lend his writing a countercultural, occasionally raving quality. His outlandish style may deter some readers from recognizing the occasional bursts of genius that percolate throughout his work.

The sheer intensity of Nelson’s writing presents an imposing barrier to close reading. To wade into a Ted Nelson book is to immerse oneself in turbocharged rhetoric. His language is peppered with wildly inventive words: “zippered lists,” “window sandwiches,” “indexing vortexes,” “part-pounces,” “tumblers,” “humbers,” and “thinkertoys.” That none of these terms have come close to entering the common parlance testifies to Nelson’s secure position on the fringe of the mainstream. But Nelson did invent one word that stuck: “hypertext.”

Computer Lib
, released as a reverse-bound, upside-down companion volume to his better-known
Dream Machines
, finds Nelson at his ranting, idiosyncratic best. Presaging the
Wired
era by 20 years,
Dream Machines
attracted a cultlike following with its radical alternative vision of computing, outrageous and provocative presentation style, and unapologetic skewering of the institutional model of com
puting. The book offered readers a technotopian vision of a new world powered by computers but ultimately putting hands in the individual creator. Here Nelson coined his famous maxim, “Everything is intertwingled,” and the book itself seems to reflect that ethos. The text makes every effort to resist linear reading, broken out in a series of cascading chunks and nested diagrams—all delivered in Nelson’s signature frenetic voice—evoking the nonlinear quality of “hypertext” that Nelson, at this point, was still only dreaming about. Bound as an oversized manifesto, with three columns of typewritten text interspersed with hundreds of Nelson’s hyperkinetic pencil sketches, the whole volume has a handmade, mimeographed quality. It almost seems to evoke the nineteenth-century Arts and Crafts ethic, resembling nothing so much as a handmade book. Inside this antic book is a searing vision of what computers could be.

While today the popular conception of hypertext has been shaped by the working reality of the World Wide Web, Nelson originally articulated a sweeping vision that went far beyond the simplistic model of one-way hyperlinks. Nelson envisioned three basic flavors of hypertext: “ordinary” hypertext, consisting of notational links and references to other documents (roughly the equivalent of a URL in a modern Web page); “stretchtext,” wherein documents would incorporate entire sections of text by allowing one document to directly access the contents of another and to easily expand one document directly into another; and “collateral hypertext,” which would facilitate person-to-person sharing of content, in which two versions of a document could open on one screen, with a facility for reviewing multiple versions of a document over time. The book also postulates a range of possible semantic relationships going well beyond simple text linking—hypergrams, hypermaps, and “branching movies”—suggesting the possibility of using networked computers to share not just documents, but visceral and sensory experiences. These various permutations of hypertext would also roll up into higher-order collections of knowledge about a particular topic: “fresh hyperbooks,” or original works about a particular topic; “anthropological hyperbooks,” containing collected references to other hyperbooks, like annotated bibliographies; and “grand systems,” consisting of “‘ev
erything’ written about the subject, or vaguely relevant to it, tied together by editors.”

 

Illustration from Ted Nelson’s
Literary Machines.

 

Nelson envisioned all of these threads coming together in a single, unified system he dubbed Xanadu, after Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s opium-fueled vision of Kublai Khan’s imaginary pleasure dome. Imagining his own Xanadu as “a new form of software with potentially revolutionary implications,” Nelson imagined an environment supporting an enormous range of tasks: word processing, file management, e-mail, and the ability to create vertical views of information drawn from a wide repository of sources. Twenty years before the Web emerged into the popular consciousness, Nelson outlined a staggeringly ambitious vision: