## Highlights Nelson, with his unfocused energy, his tiny attention span, his omnivorous fascination with trivia, and his commitment to recording incidents whose meaning he will never analyze, is the human embodiment of the information explosion. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j2swk8p55rs5375we56qdtg1)) --- Not only was the constant churn and dispersal of his own thoughts personally devastating, but the general human failure to remember was, Nelson thought, suicidal on a global scale, for it condemned humanity to an irrational repetition of its mistakes. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j2swsa7j9rdjdbe7r7ad86ww)) --- Hypertext was invented during his first year at Harvard, when Nelson attempted, as a term project, to create a "writing system" that allowed users to store their work, change it, and print it out. In contrast to the first experimental word processors, Nelson's design included features for comparing alternate versions of text side by side, backtracking through sequential versions, and revision by outline. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j2swtfs8kq0e0d63fevrtmqt)) --- The word hypertext was coined by Nelson and published in a paper delivered to a national conference of the Association for Computing Machinery in 1965. Adding to his design for a nonsequential writing tool, Nelson proposed a feature called "zippered lists," in which elements in one text would be linked to related or identical elements in other texts. Nelson's two interests, screen editing and nonsequential writing, were merging. With zippered lists, links could be made between large sections, small sections, whole pages, or single paragraphs. The writer and reader could manufacture a unique document by following a set of links between discrete documents that were "zipped" together. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j2sww0mwva1ah6c4p94yjmvz)) > Note: Clear intellectual predecessor of linked notes --- The basic features of the Xanadu hypertext system planned at Autodesk in 1989 were relatively unchanged from the ones discussed by the early Xanadu programmers at Swarthmore in 1979. In fact, the design was still similar in many respects to the sketches Ted Nelson made back in 1965. Xanadu was to consist of easy-to-edit documents. Links would be available both to and from any part of any document. Anybody could create a link, even in a document they did not write. And parts of documents could be quoted in other documents without copying. The idea of quoting without copying was called transclusion, and it was the heart of Xanadu's most innovative commercial feature - a royalty and copyright scheme. Whenever an author wished to quote, he or she would use transclusion to "virtually include" the passage in his or her own document. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j2szjpfrzjwenyjfj25zmwx0)) > Note: Original of transclusion in Obsidian! --- The young programmer's doubts were magnified by his dawning realization that a grand, centralized system was no longer the solution to anything. He had grown up with the Internet - a redundant, ever-multiplying and increasingly chaotic mass of documents. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j2t3q3phjf66w8hx4cr3y1sw)) --- He saw the beauty of the Xanadu dream - "How do you codify all the information in the world in a way that is infinitely scalable?" - but he suspected that human society might not benefit from a perfect technological memory. Thinking is based on selection and weeding out; remembering everything is strangely similar to forgetting everything. "Maybe most things that people do shouldn't be remembered," Jellinghaus says. "Maybe forgetting is good." ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j2t3rvz2ygqbe0eymhjc10m4)) --- In Geneva, Tim Berners-Lee, completely ignorant of the Xanadu propaganda, wrote a simple standard for hypertext publishing, which he named the World Wide Web. In Urbana-Champaign, Illinois, Marc Andreessen wrote an attractive front end for the Web, which he called Mosaic. Powered by anarchy and a passion for self-improvement, the Internet lurched toward hypertext. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j2t3w45q9rcjhdz8q94c8zjd)) --- ## New highlights added 2024-07-17 It was the most radical computer dream of the hacker era. Ted Nelson's Xanadu project was supposed to be the universal, democratic hypertext library that would help human life evolve into an entirely new form. Instead, it sucked Nelson and his intrepid band of true believers into what became the longest-running vaporware project in the history of computing - a 30-year saga of rabid prototyping and heart-slashing despair. The amazing epic tragedy. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j2w115jbfz0f170rddamhnxd)) --- Nelson's life is so full of unfinished projects that it might fairly be said to be built from them, much as lace is built from holes or Philip Johnson's glass house from windows. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j2w11x6tzb25m8hfdpszd5w7)) --- Xanadu was meant to be a universal library, a worldwide hypertext publishing tool, a system to resolve copyright disputes, and a meritocratic forum for discussion and debate. By putting all information within reach of all people, Xanadu was meant to eliminate scientific ignorance and cure political misunderstandings. And, on the very hackerish assumption that global catastrophes are caused by ignorance, stupidity, and communication failures, Xanadu was supposed to save the world. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j2w13qd3fav91d4e54y268x9)) --- Xanadu, the ultimate hypertext information system, began as Ted Nelson's quest for personal liberation. The inventor's hummingbird mind and his inability to keep track of anything left him relatively helpless. He wanted to be a writer and a filmmaker, but he needed a way to avoid getting lost in the frantic multiplication of associations his brain produced. His great inspiration was to imagine a computer program that could keep track of all the divergent paths of his thinking and writing. To this concept of branching, nonlinear writing, Nelson gave the name [hypertext](https://www.wired.com/1995/06/xanadu/#4). ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j2w151c16v9e4sshdgy6grt5)) --- The story of Ted Nelson's Xanadu is the story of the dawn of the information age. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j2w1606fpckdv4ww5ez6jtsg)) --- Nelson records everything and remembers nothing. Xanadu was to have been his cure. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j2w16fypvnk5g9c14y8n7f2w)) --- Bored and disgusted by school, he once plotted to stab his seventh-grade teacher with a sharpened screwdriver, but lost his nerve at the last minute and instead walked out of the classroom, never to return. On his long walk home, he came up with the four maxims that have guided his life: most people are fools, most authority is malignant, God does not exist, and everything is wrong. Nelson loves these maxims and repeats them often. They lead him to sympathize, in every discussion, with the rejected idea and the discounted option. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j2w1826vk70v35xv3231f8y2)) --- Tormented by his own faulty memory, Nelson developed the habit of asserting that only a technology for the preservation of all knowledge could prevent the destruction of life on Earth. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j2w18we5t48pbytp9hzpbnyw)) --- Many precedents for the idea of hypertext existed in literature and science. [The Talmud](https://www.wired.com/1995/06/xanadu/#talmud), for instance, is a sort of hypertext, with blocks of commentary arranged in concentric rectangles around the page. So are scholarly footnotes, with their numbered links between the main body of the text and supplementary scholarship. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j2w1a9m0xrrn4h30qy5sfkv6)) --- In July 1945, long before Nelson turned his attention to electronic information systems, [Vannevar Bush](https://www.wired.com/1995/06/xanadu/#vannevar) published an essay titled "As We May Think" in The Atlantic Monthly, which described a hypothetical system of information storage and retrieval called "memex." Memex would allow readers to create personal indexes to documents, and to link passages from different documents together with special markers. While Bush's description was purely speculative, he gave a brilliant and influential preview of some of the features Nelson would attempt to realize in Xanadu. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j2w1ar7dngwhc4vqfkxbvmjq)) --- It was a name of uncanny exactitude. Xanadu is the elaborate palace in [Kubla Khan](https://www.wired.com/1995/06/xanadu/#kubla)." In his famous tale of the poem's origin, Coleridge claimed to have woken from a narcotic reverie with hundreds of lines of poetry in his head. As he was about to transcribe them, he was interrupted by a visitor, and when he returned to his writing table, the vivid oneiric composition had evaporated. In his preface to the fragment that remained, Coleridge lamented: *Then all the charm* *Is broken - all that phantom-world so fair* *Vanishes, and a thousand circlets spread,* *And each mis-shape[s] the other....* ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j2w1c5xh2xgws7pvvsvnebpw)) --- Any nitwit can understand computers, and many do," announced Nelson in the 1974 introduction to the first edition of [Computer Lib](https://www.wired.com/1995/06/xanadu/#computerlib). His opus was really two books, attached to each other upside down and backward, like the old Ace Doubles or, as Nelson enjoys pointing out, like The Italian/Polish Joke Book. One cover showed a revolutionary fist inside a computer. When readers flipped the book over, they saw the cover of Dream Machines, decorated with an airborne man in a Superman cape reaching out with his finger to touch a screen. The book was large - 11 inches wide and 16 inches tall - and contained a 300,000-word manifesto of the digital revolution. The print was tiny, and the layout confusing. Nelson wrote out his rough draft, which consisted of hundreds of individual rants, on a typewriter; then cut and pasted the rants together onto sheets of cardboard; took the sheets to a printer; and returned some weeks later to pick up cartons of books. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j2w1eszdt8r1qegwh8ect8jb)) --- Computer Lib assigned to programmers a noble role in the battle for humanity's future, and it recruited them for the rebellion they were witnessing on their college campuses. When programmers read Computer Lib, they could discern a portrait of the book's ideal reader - an anxious, skeptical, interested, sensible, free-thinking citizen who wanted better digital tools. At the time of Computer Lib, this popular audience for news about the digital revolution did not exist. But the people to whom Computer Lib became a bible wished that this audience existed. Computer Lib reflected back to computer programmers an idealized image of themselves. In this sense, it was a far subtler book than Nelson set out to write. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j2w1gwymzps41sqdam0hchnk)) --- A hundred years ago, with only the products of the printing press to aid them, the Britannica encyclopedists built a collection of information that, while incomplete, convincingly pointed the way toward total knowledge. Today, with the advent of far more powerful memory devices, Xanadu, the grandest encyclopedic project of our era, seemed not only a failure but an actual symptom of madness. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j2w0mvaadcrkx9ae1n56x1jq)) --- Xanadu is the great hacker dream. It is supposed to provide a universal library, collaborative editing, the ability to trace the changes in documents through successive versions, a means to track and credit authorship, a royalty system, and nonsequential writing. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j2w0txytmrqpz605v0cayeah)) --- **T** "By 'hypertext' mean nonsequential writing - text that branches and allows choice to the reader, best read at an interactive screen." - Ted Nelson, *Literary Machines* ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j2w0vbynv1366k8g4htt3ywg)) --- *The Talmud* contains commentaries on the first five books of the Bible, and commentaries on the commentaries. Its many conflicting voices are arranged on the page in a kind of hypertext. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j2w0vxcnx78zhkkhzz2b6s9b)) ---