openpolitics.com

Cyberspace Report: What inspiration led you to develop hypertext?

Ted Nelson: Well I was always, as a kid, into writing and reading and literature and movies basically, like a lot of people, and I had done a great deal of writing as a youth, and re-writing, and the intricacy of taking ideas and sentences and trying to arrange them into coherent, sensible, structures of thought struck me as a particularly intricate and complex task, and I particularly minded having to take thoughts which were not intrinsically sequential and somehow put them in a row because print as it appears on the paper, or in handwriting, is sequential. There was always something wrong with that because you were trying to take these thoughts which had a structure, shall we say, a spatial structure all their own, and put them into linear form. Then the reader had to take this linear structure and recompose his or her picture of the overall content, once again placed in this nonsequential structure. You had two it seemed — and now I’m reconstructing because I don’t know how explicitly I thought this out as a youth — you had to take these two additional steps of deconstructing some thoughts into linear sequence, and then reconstructing them. Why couldn’t that all be bypassed by having a nonsequential structure of thought which you presented directly? That was the hypothesis — well the hyperthesis really — of hypertext, that you could save both the writer’s time and the reader’s time and effort in putting together and understanding what was being presented.

.. Now that the WWW is so dominant, how does Xanadu have to change, to modify itself to fit into the new reality of a WWW world?

TN: That’s a good question, I’m still muddling with it. First of all, I think the WWW was a brilliant simplification. As I understand it, and maybe I have this wrong, but Tim Berners-Lee came and we had lunch, in, oh I guess it was 1989, 90, something like that, in Sausalito, and I really liked the guy, and he’d done this very simple thing, and it sounded too trivial to me {laughs} but he certainly was a nice fellow and I expected to keep in touch with him, although I am a very bad correspondent, and the next thing I knew suddenly the thing had caught on.

.. But all it is is FTP with lipstick so that you can look at these things and the jump addresses are hidden and the formats and you have paragraph levels and stuff and it’s basically what people needed and frankly I think it’s much better than word processing. I’m really happy now that I’m planning to switch from Microsoft Word to HTML just because there’s no need not to. It’s a perfectly good format, and it makes everything simpler to browse in.

.. CR: If some people who have what seem like visionary ideas right now, how would you encourage them to go about turning them into reality based on your own experiences?

TN: What would I recommend to a young visionary today? {laughter} Very straightforward, learn to deal with short term goals and not delegate. I trusted them {laughter} famous last words. These are people I still love and respect, but if I had been able to hold it together and {pause} not try to overstretch and overgrab and managed short term goals better, things would have been very different. But again I took a big goal as a single unit and then I turned it over to others who took it as a single unit and made it a bigger goal and thus postponed dealing with a well-defined situation.