would be better if only it were completely different, and this has led to many disappointing experiments.)
Designers were always my special heroes, starting when I was a small boy with Leonardo daVinci and Frank Lloyd Wright. At the age of nine or ten I was very taken with Wright’s “Fallingwater” building, which has a stream running through it, a radical and beautiful design. Inspired by this, I designed in my mind, and wrote up for the school paper, a house that would be completely under water.
I read about Buckminster Fuller when I was eleven, in 1 949, long before he became well-known. He was a designer who said that we must create radically new designs to live on a planet with dwindling resources. Following Bucky Fuller’s point of view, I believed that everything would be far better if only it could be redesigned completely.
Many other designers were my heroes: Raymond Loewy, who designed the 1947 Studebaker and an earlier, muscular-looking locomotive engine that practically defined the term “streamlined train”; Bernard Rudofsky, who mocked our systems of clothing; Charles Eames and his wife Ray, who for many years were principal designers for IBM.
In high school I was bemused- and amused- by the designs of Peter Schlumbohm, who designed the Chemex coffeemaker, the Chemex cigarette holder, and the Chemex electric fan (which cleaned the air considerably). Each of these used a disk of filter paper every day; Schlumbohm loved filter paper. It was a wonderful example of an idea filling the universe. I thought this man’s obsession was quite charming. This to me has always been the model of an idea expanding to fill the universe.
An Open Letter From Ted Nelson
I feel as if I have not succeeded. I invented hypertext, I coined phrases and developed internet theory, I founded “ibm”, I’ve done some incredible things with my life. But my main project, and my ultimate passion has never been finished. Thus, you’re all missing out, and it looks as if you will all continue to miss out because the development of the internet has surpassed my control.
Philosophy of Hypertext, by Ted Nelson: page 53
come about. But the question of exactly what these forms of writing would be was- and indeed remains today- an ongoing question that only grows.
(I didn’t know what to call these ideas; “hypertext” came to me in 1962, and I published it in 1965 (23). I first heard strangers use it around 1986.)
My Hypertext Agenda
Within weeks, I had a personal agenda that was vastly ambitious and totally obvious, based on everything I had thought about before in my life-
GENERALISM AND ACCESS
This was the way to help make the world safe for generalists, and make everyone more of a generalist-
- Increase knowledge and access
- Make clear the interconnectedness of everything
- Make all ideas clearer and more accessible
- Progressively make all the written works of mankind available.
- Obviously no one can read or know everything, but it can all be made much more accessible.
- New kinds of quotations and reviews would provide better access to the contents of all documents. Every quotation could open to its original context! Every quotation would be a kind of punch-through gateway to the original. And anyone could create such digests, quoting parts of any documents, because we’d be able to handle the copyright problem (Appendix G).
- We would harden the archive, in digital form, against such future dangers as nuclear war; possibly storing it in orbit or further out in deep space.
Philosophy of Hypertext, by Ted Nelson: page 51
Part 3.
Why Hypertext and Why MeIn the fall of 1960 I had a vast, unified vision of a hypertext future. Hypertext hit me as an idea simple and explosive, with ramifications in every direction, and it led me to a revolutionary intellectual agenda.
In its sweep and emotional power this vision resembled the rowboat experience of 1943 and the Schematics paper of 1958. It was similarly huge in scope, similarly sweeping in apparent unity, and similarly impossible to express. I told this vision to a few people, but most could not understand what I was talking about. Call it brashness, call it extreme egotism, but I have always been willing and determined to proceed with my own designs based on my own understandings, which have always been very different from those of other people.
The 1960 Epiphany
In 1960, in my second year of graduate school (studying sociology), I had a chance to take a course called “Computers for the Social Sciences. ” It was a good course, which I found thrilling, and as soon as I found out what computers really were- All-Purpose Machines, as von Neumann had called them (but the press did not catch onto that term), I desperately wanted one (although no individual in the world owned a computer at that time).
The explosive moment came when I saw that you could hook graphical displays to computers. At once- over a few weeks- I saw that this would be the future of humanity: working at screens, able to read and write and publish from ever expanding new electronic repositories.