The Road to Xanadu

Add to that list: brilliant, innovative and unconventional. But not resentful, even though some of his key ideas, including his Xanadu operating system, still lack the wide acceptance he has long pursued.

“I’m much less bitter than I used to be,” he said. “I have a lovely wife who has mellowed me, you might say.”

Philosophy of Hypertext, by Ted Nelson, page 48

Representation Systems, or KRS- became popular.)

My course in structural linguistics was an exciting revelation: how the real structure of language was rediscovered in the nineteen-twenties (having been known by scholars in India long ago).  I began to wonder intently how this particular kind of abstraction could be extended to the discovery of similarities in other areas. (The chief exponent of this model, and one of the discoverers of the structure of language, was Leonard Bloomfield, who also spoke of infinities of models.)

These ideas crystallized in a seminar I took my third year in college with Michael Scriven, a remarkably brilliant and forthright philosophy professor. He provided more information faster, and more swiftly-flowing arguments, than I had ever heard before, and gave me a great sense of inspiration for the project.

1958 SCHEMATICS

The 1958 Schematics paper was thus written as my term paper for Michael Scriven’s course in Social Philosophy. I meant it to be the foundation of a new field ofabstraction and representation.

The experience of writing it was one of the most intense I have ever experienced, in an exalted state of excitement and inspiration.

The same epiphany I had experienced at the age of five, of the immensity and indescribability of the world, came to me again, but this time with regard to realizing how models and language and thought worked, a way of approaching the great complexity I had envisioned long before.

These ideas have never left me, and I have made many notes about them over the

These ideas have never left me, and I have made many notes about them over the years, notes whose interconnectedness defied all conventional organization.