The computers we use and the Web we know seem to him but dim shadows of what might have been. His ideas, once dismissed as utopian, have become central facts of modern life. Nelson earned fame among his colleagues, was knighted an Officier des Arts et des Lettres in France in 2001, and obtained a Ph.D. The implementation of these literary machines was deeply influenced by Nelson’s books, and many of the engineers and entrepreneurs who designed and built the pioneering systems saw themselves as Nelson’s followers. His vision of ubiquitous computers has become commonplace and his dream of a docuverse of interlinked literature-a global library accessible from desks and tablets and cell phones throughout the world-is now real. Where Vannevar Bush foresaw the computer as a workstation for elite scientists (assisted by a legion of “girls” working at their keyboards), Nelson insisted from the outset on “Computers for the People,” proclaiming, “You can and must understand computers now.”ĪT A TIME WHEN ONLY LARGE INSTITUTIONS owned computers, Nelson wrote about personal computing.
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The omnivorous intellectual interests (and lengthy reading lists) long characteristic of Swarthmore students are reflected in Nelson’s insistence that reading is nonsequential, that each reader must be free to follow fresh paths as spirit and understanding dictate. This starts with the College’s foundational belief in the equal dignity of art, science, and engineering: All of Nelson’s work emphasizes their unity. Possiplex makes it clear that Swarthmore exerted and continues to exert a strong influence on Nelson.
Justin Hall ’98, while a freshman, started and crafted what was arguably the first confessional weblog. Five Swarthmore alumni from the 1970s started my current employer Eastgate Systems, which has published literary hypertexts and designed hypertext writing tools since 1982. His classmate Andries van Dam ’59 earned one of the first doctorates in computer science, was central to the development of computer graphics, and over the span of four decades has worked on hypertext systems for creating and reading electronic books. Nelson, who coined the term, graduated in 1959 and returned as a lecturer in 1977-where I first met him and first caught the hypertext bug. SWARTHMORE'S ASSOCIATION WITH HYPERTEXT runs deep. It is all-he has long warned us-all wrong. But Nelson views this without satisfaction. That the Web we know comes close to Nelson’s original vision strikes most of Nelson’s colleagues as remarkable. Possiplex is Ted Nelson’s new autobiography-an account of “movies, intellect, creative control, my computer life, and the fight for civilization.” It chronicles Nelson’s struggle to build a world of interconnected information that would be readily available to nearly everyone, built upon a sustainable foundation of justice toward writers. But these were speculations about a distant future Nelson thought his system was imminently achievable and set out to build it. Murray Leinster’s science fiction short story “A Logic Named Joe” (1946) foresaw a network of preternaturally helpful computer terminals, spreading chaos in their eagerness to provide answers to awkward questions. Interrogator: How about ‘a winter's day’? That would scan all right.Ĭomputer: Yes, but nobody wants to be compared to a winter's day. Interrogator: In the first line of your sonnet, which reads ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer's day,’ would not ‘a spring day’ do as well or better?
Alan Turing’s 1950 paper on “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” imagined discussing a sonnet with a computer: Occasionally, speculative articles and science fiction stories had envisioned intelligent and even literary machines. In 1958, computers were chiefly associated with mathematical simulations for plotting artillery and with large-scale tabulation of census data. Computers were scarce, expensive, and slow even 20 years later, all of Swarthmore’s administrative and academic computing needs were satisfied by a single computer with three 1-megabyte disk drives-a machine less powerful than today’s smartphones. The computer of 1958 was not a likely site for writing. The pursuit of that idea changed the world. He wondered if the recently invented computer might play a role in solving the problem and sketched out some ideas for how a literary machine might facilitate better term papers, better libraries, and indeed a better repository for the world's documents. He was overflowing with ideas and awash in distractions, and e was intensely frustrated that these ideas could not be easily organized on paper. IN A WHARTON LOUNGE A LITTLE MORE THAN 50 YEARS AGO, a Swarthmore student named Ted Nelson tried to compose a difficult seminar paper.
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