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.

Part 3.
Why Hypertext and Why Me

In 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.