BBC: Visionary lays into the web

So in my uncertainty, I went to graduate school and there it all happened. In my second year in graduate school, I took a computer course and that was like lightening striking. The heavens rolled apart. This was it – it was obvious, the human race would spend the rest of its career at computer screens.

.. The four walls of paper are like a prison because every idea wants to spring out in all directions – everything is connected with everything else, sometimes more than others.

.. So, I was always frustrated having to write and having to cut things. Why should you have to cut anything? The ideas keep going, you have the material, you cut because there’s a limit to the space allowed to you. And the space is limited because of some other constraints that have to do with money or printing or whatever.

.. But it seemed to me that as soon as you have computer storage you could put every point you wanted in – make the ones that are less relevant to your central topic, further away or allow the central topic to move as the reader proceeded. So, that notion of hypertext seemed to me immediately obvious because footnotes were already the ideas wriggling, struggling to get free, like a cat trying to get out of your arms.

.. you may now be sufficiently immured in the system that you now using anything else would be unsettling.