The Importance of Ted's Vision

Sometimes a journey makes itself necessary, as Anne Carson puts it in Autobiography of Red [ 3 , p. 46]. For Nelson it has been a long journey, at times a very diffi cult one, but it has been necessary. Necessary for him personally—as he puts it in Possiplex , “I have no alternative but to go on. Like Shackleton of Antarctica I fi nd myself enmeshed in a harsh duty that was not the original plan... I will fi ght for it to my last breath” [ 10 , p. 339]. He has survived the journey so far, his ideals held high above the mud. But as the Intertwingled conference has demonstrated, as the people who have spoken here have demonstrated, the journey has also been necessary for the computing world. Nelson’s vision is, I think, the most important vision in the history of computing. That’s a tall call, so I’ll need to explain my reasoning. In my book Memory Machines [ 1 ], I argue that the idea of a universal digital publishing system, an “open hypermedia” system, originated with Nelson. Bush’s vision, though it was about connected items, was analogue. Engelbart’s vision was also profoundly important. He was fi rst to build many of the things we take for granted in modern computing (and I don’t mean the mouse; I mean the whole concept of real-time, networked, interactive computing). His contributions would take hours to elaborate. But he was not thinking about hypertext as a domestic thing–something your mom and pop would consume over latte and a cheeseburger. Nelson saw that hypertext on a computer screen would spread around the globe like electronic kudzu vine. He wrote singing commercials for it; he even sketched a quirky interior for a Xanadu café. What Nelson saw was an anarchic, global hypertext publishing system: a “digital repository scheme for world-wide electronic publishing” [ 9 , p. 3/2]. While working at