In 2003, I had a catastrophic equipment failure in my office. My working hard disk—including all of my manuscripts—and its backups were destroyed. Back then I never archived my projects, only backed them up, redundantly. I thought that was enough. I was mistaken. In referring to my earlier writings, I discovered that much of that writing holds up pretty well, so I’m reproducing it here for reference and the record. This article is from Macintosh Hypermedia Volume I, Reference Guide (Scott, Foresman and Company, 1990).
The third figure in the hypermedia historical triumvirate is a madman extraordinaire and one of the most brilliant minds of our time. How do you describe someone who carries around an encyclopedic knowledge base between his ears and simultaneously manages to maintain the spark of creativity? What are we to think of an individual who, when after almost 30 years of intense work finally receives adequate funding for his publicly accessible hypermedia repository, scribbles notes on his arm in purple marker during a press conference? How much stock should we put in the ideas of a computer visionary who generally refuses to use a computer? Sounds like my kind of guy. The caricatures are of Ted Nelson: the individual generally credited with coining the term hypertext and popularizing the concept by making it real to anyone who cared to immerse himself or herself in Nelson’s vast stores of rambling knowledge.
Nelson, influenced by Vannevar Bush, first used the term hypertext in the mid-1960s to describe a form of nonsequential writing. Most of his written works, most notably Computer Lib/Dream Machines and Literary Machines, have served to influence the current generation of hypermedia pioneers more than any other texts. If Bush was seen as a forward-thinker, Nelson has to be perceived as not of this planet.
His project of almost 30 years is Xanadu, a global information repository and network he refers to as the “magic place of literary memory.” Based on his concept of “universal hypertext,” Xanadu will consist of many thousands of nodes throughout the world, some of which will exist as fast-food franchiselike establishments Nelson refers to as “Silverstands.” When Xanadu becomes a reality—as it most assuredly will now that implementation funding has been acquired—many thousands of users will have simultaneous access to mountains of information, through which they will be able to create their own knowledge trails and endless document revisions. Of course, Nelson himself acknowledges that the name “Xanadu” is based on Coleridge’s unfinished poem, so there are no guarantees.
In the late 1960s, Nelson worked with Andries van Dam and a group of undergraduate students at Brown University to create the Hypertext Editing System, one of the first hypertext systems. The initial project was funded by IBM and was used for the Apollo space missions by National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). The system, almost predictably, was not a commercial success and by 1970 Nelson was on to other projects. Andries van Dam and his students went on to create FRESS (an acronym for File Retrieval Editing SyStem) at Brown.
Last July at the
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Anyone who’s been paying attention has to realize that higher education is caught in the same death spiral as real estate and the banks. But instead of debt fueling the spiral, higher education’s spiral is fueled by rising tuition and endowments. It’s unsustainable. Colleges and universities are in the information transportation business. Yes, yes, there’s the self-exploration and professorial interaction that’s an enormous part of the college experience—and the value delivered—but in the main, institutions of higher education transport information. Technology in general, and the internet in particular are collapsing the economics of transporting information in all areas of the culture and economy.
Since 1993, I’ve ping-ponged back and forth between open source and commercial software to run farces.com. Most recently—since July 2002 according to the