I knew Ted back when he was writing Computer Lib/Dream Machines (I’m in it several times). He’s a wonderful visionary. His visions are about literature, primarily. He also has visions about the literary uses of computers, because he’s a good visionary. But he is, first and foremost, a writer, and royalties are of prime importance to him. Ted, and I kid you not, loves to scribble his ideas on 3×5 cards or 4×6 cards while he’s explaining his latest ideas. Diagrams, arrows, labels, cute pictures, man, he’s great at it. And absolutely every single last one of these cards gets ‘C’-in-a-circle Copyright 19xx written on it, and it goes back into his pocket. His vision of Xanadu is of a system where absolutely everybody retains eternal rights to whatever they create, and gets paid royalties every time it’s used. Period. Don’t think otherwise. Is this a good thing? Yes. Is it a feature which will lead to its adoption by the masses? Hell no. The Web exploded because the Web is free. Don’t fool yourself on that one.
Ted Nelson Discovers Hypertext
The word “hypertext” was first coined by Nelson in 1963, and is first found in print in a college newspaper article about a lecture he gave called “Computers, Creativity, and the Nature of the Written Word” in January, 1965:
Chapter Fourteen: Xanadu, Network Culture, and Beyond
Ted Nelson is one of the most outrageous and probably the funniest of the infonauts.
Xanalogical Structure, Needed Now More than Ever
The World Wide Web was not what we were working toward, it was what we were trying to *prevent*. The Web displaced our principled model with something far more raw, chaotic and short-sighted. Its one-way breaking links glorified and fetishized as “websites” those very hierarchical directories from which we sought to free users, and discarded the ideas of stable publishing, annotation, two-way connection and trackable change.
This article is intended to explain our alternative model.