Philosophy of Hypertext, by Ted Nelson: page 51

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.