In Venting, a Computer Visionary Educates

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

I am reading the book djf


Begin forwarded message:

From: dewayne () warpspeed com (Dewayne Hendricks)
Date: January 13, 2009 4:28:54 AM EST
To: Dewayne-Net Technology List <xyzzy () warpspeed com>
Subject: [Dewayne-Net] In Venting, a Computer Visionary Educates

January 11, 2009
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In Venting, a Computer Visionary Educates
By JOHN MARKOFF
<http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/11/business/11stream.html?partner=rss&emc=rss&pagewanted=all 
>

BEFORE the personal computer, and before the Web, there was Theodor  
Holm Nelson, who almost half a century ago understood how computers  
would transform the printed page.

Mr. Nelson anticipated and inspired the World Wide Web, and he coined  
the term “hypertext,” which embodies the idea of linking a web of  
objects including text, audio and video.

In his self-published new book, “Geeks Bearing Gifts: How the Computer  
World Got This Way” (available on lulu.com), Mr. Nelson, 71, takes  
stock of the computing world. The look back by this forward-thinking  
man is not without its bitterness. The Web, after all, can be seen as  
a bastardization of his original notion that hyperlinks should point  
both forward and backward.

Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, organized all the  
world’s content through a one-way mechanism of uniform source  
locators, or URLs. Lost in the process was Mr. Nelson’s two-way link  
concept that simultaneously pointed to the content in any two  
connected documents, protecting, he has argued in vain, the original  
intellectual lineage of any object.

One-way links can be easily broken, and there is no simple way to  
preserve authorship and credit, as was possible with a project called  
Xanadu that Mr. Nelson began in the 1960s. His two-way links might  
have avoided the Web’s tornado-like destruction of the economic value  
of the printed word, he has contended, by incorporating a system of  
micropayments.

A generation of young computer enthusiasts who grew up in the 1960s  
and 1970s was deeply influenced by Mr. Nelson’s ideas. In 1974, his  
book “Computer Lib: You Can and Must Understand Computers Now,” was a  
call to arms to reinvent computing.

The book was written as a pastiche, in the tradition of the “Whole  
Earth Catalog” and as a paper-based placeholder for the Xanadu system  
that he believed would inevitably take hold. The book was seductive  
fun. It was actually two books in one: beginning on opposite covers,  
it could be read forward and backward, with the book on the opposite  
side titled “Dream Machines: New Freedoms Through Computer Screens — a  
Minority Report.”

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