“I feel a special kinship to him. I do not have his brains or his capabilities…but I know how it feels to be the only person in the world who understands something, both the escatcy and bitterness of it, being all along amongst beatiful stuff, having no one else to share it with and other sneering.”
Xanadu: censorship nearly impossible
Roger Gregory, Ted Nelson’s most loyal collaborator, is a sad man. He suffers from a common, disabling ailment that Abraham Lincoln, who was similarly afflicted, called “the hypos.” His sadness grows so acute at times that he becomes incapable of working, and his fits of black sorrow go back many, many years.
.. Nelson’s idea, McClary explained, was that the computer was the resource to get into the hands of the people. With a global publishing system, the need for printing presses could be eliminated. Censorship would be difficult, if not impossible.
.. Nelson became convinced that they were making major contributions to computer science. He believed that the newest versions of the data-search algorithms, dubbed “General Enfilade Theory,” allowed the Xanadu system to grow forever without its performance degrading unacceptably.
.. Enormously bitter, he was furious at the setbacks but helpless to grieve and move on. Around this time, Nelson contemplated suicide and got as far as holding the pills in his hand.
.. “Maybe most things that people do shouldn’t be remembered,” Jellinghaus says. “Maybe forgetting is good.”
Ted Nelson: Can’t do Arithmetic
Nelson said. “I still can’t add up a checkbook: I can add a column of figures five times, get four different answers, and none of them will be right.
.. Dyslexia, ADD, dyslexia, bi-polar, etc. came the replies. I have concluded that most visionaries in the learning field have Jimmy Swaggart syndrome brought on by trying to solve the world’s learning disorders.
Ted Nelson & John Perry Barlow For MONDO 2000
The conversation between Nelson and Barlow took place in a restaurant in Sausalito and was published in 1990 in MONDO 2000 Issue #4 under the title “Caverns Measureless To Man: An Interview with Xanadu Founder Ted Nelson by John Perry Barlow.”
Listen to Nelson tell Barlow about “biostatus”