5.6.1 When I published Computer Lib in 1974, computers were big oppressive systems off in air-conditioned rooms. In the 1987 edition of Computer Lib-the Microsoft edition!-I wrote, "Now you can be oppressed in your own living room!" It has gotten far worse. (Ted Nelson homepage)

5.6.2 In 1965 Ted Nelson coined the terms 'hypertext' and 'hypermedia' in a paper to the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) twentieth national conference, referring to non-sequential writings and branching presentations of all types. (Nelson, 1965) Five years earlier, he designed two screen windows connected by visible lines that pointed from parts of an object in one window to corresponding parts of an object in another window. He called for the transformation of computers into "literary machines," which would link together all human writing, and he saw this associational organisation of computer as a model of his own creative and distractible consciousness, which he described as a "hummingbird mind." Nelson defined hypermedia as

5.6.3 branching or performing presentations which respond to user actions, systems of prearranged words and pictures (for example) that may be explored freely and queried in stylized ways. They will not be 'programmed' but rather designed, written and drawn and edited by authors, artists, designers and editors. Like ordinary prose and pictures, they will be media and because they are in some sense 'multi-dimensional,' we may call them hypermedia, following the mathematical use of the term 'hyper.' (Nelson, 1974, pg. 133)

5.6.4 Nelson's vision of how information may be accessed associatively using a computerized system is what completed the pieces of the puzzle that finally resulted in what we now know as the World Wide Web. This vision was Nelson's Xanadu, a next generation of Wells's World Brain. To this day Nelson continues to work on his Xanadu project, proposing alternatives to the monolithic system being built by corporations such as Microsoft. He maintains that the Xanadu system is extremely different from that of HTML or any other popular system. The Xanadu connective structure consists of both links and transclusions, in which a link is a connection between things that are different and a transclusion is a connection between things that are the same.

5.6.5 In 1998, thirty eight years after proposing the visionary hypertext system, Nelson announced the launch of a shareware software program called Zig Zag: "This is my new proposal for a complete computing world. I designed it in the 1980s, and it is beautifully implemented now. It is multidimensional; you might call it the Rubik's (cube) operating system." (Glave, 1998, pg. #) Nelson also announced a public release version of Xanadu multimedia and hypertext publishing systems as well as an electronic-payment scheme called Hypercoin. In continuous development since 1960, Xanadu is based on a principle of sideways connections among documents and files. But, while Xanadu was still in development Tim Berners-Lee came up with what we know today as the World Wide Web, which completely overshadowed Xanadu.

5.6.6 According to Nelson, Tim Berners-Lee, designer of the original Web protocols, was unaware of Xanadu's hypertextual ideas when he started his work around 1990. On the other hand, Marc Anderseen, creator of Mosaic, the first GUI on the Web, was directly influenced by Nelson's work. With the introduction of a GUI to the vast repository of information on the Internet, the first to respond were libraries. Fuller's Geoscope, Bush's Memex, Wells's World Brain, and Nelson's Xanadu were suddenly collapsed into one huge infrastructure driven by the combined interests of corporations and academia. Because of the seemingly impossible task of organising the existing Internet into a cohesive and controllable communication network, the joint efforts of industry and academia have put plans in place for Internet 2, which, unlike the original Internet, is very much a planned enterprise. [top]