Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
40 Aspen Movie Map
video-disk demonstra-
tion, 1978 (2).
developed in the context of avant-garde art practice and counter
cultural performance, were first applied to computers.
21
The Whole Earth Catalog
inspired maverick Theodor Holm (Ted)
Nelson to proclaim a vision of the expanded possibilities of com-
puters in his topic
Computer Lib /Machine Dreams
.
22
Nelson was a
philosophy graduate who had come into contact with computers
while studying for a sociology masters degree at Harvard in
. His
remarkably prescient, and at the time, eccentric, perception of their
possibilities, led him to try to build a word-processing system before
either the name or the concept existed. In
1960
he gave a paper at
the conference of the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM),
in which he laid out his vision for what he called 'hypertext', by which
he referred to non-linear, linked texts. Nelson attempted to realize
his ideas by developing 'Xanadu'. This was a software framework,
greatly influenced by Vannevar Bush's
1965
article 'As We May Think'
(which also inspired Engelbart) that would enable access to all the
world's textual information, and make it possible to link and exam-
ine texts in parallel and to produce new versions. Xanadu's arrival has
been imminent since the mid-
1945
s, but much of what it promises
has been realized by the World Wide Web. Thus Nelson's influence
has been felt more at the conceptual than the practical level.
One of the great beneficiaries of the turmoil of the late
1960
1960
s and
early '
70
s, of which the counter-culture was part, was the research
