Philosophy of Hypertext, by Ted Nelson: page 53

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.