Project Xanadu

Unlike many of the more sheltered academics, he also saw the potential of a hobbyist "underground." Nelson chose to bypass (and thereby antagonize) both the academic and industrial computerists by appealing directly to the public in a series of self-published tracts that railed against the pronouncements of the programming priesthood.

Like Doug Engelbart, whose work he had yet to learn about, Nelson yearned for more than a lazy man's typewriter. They both wanted the freedom to steer their thought paths in new ways. And Ted especially desired the prerogative of changing his mind. He wanted the freedom to insert and delete words and move paragraphs around, but he also wanted the computer to remember his decision path. One of the specs was for something he called "historical backtrack," in which the computer could quickly show him the various earlier alternative versions of his ever-changing text.

Alternative versions"? From a place to store notes to a tool for sculpting text, his term project had now landed him in even more wondrous science-fiction territory, a place where it was possible to think in terms of parallel alternatives. Of entire libraries of parallel alternatives, and automated librarians to perform the most tedious of searches in microseconds. Why should we abandon any thought at all? Why not just store every variation on everything and let the computer take care of sifting through it when we want to view something?

Nelson realized that he was trying to create a new kind of thing. It was a tool, but it was also a library, and a medium, and a legion of slave-librarians. In the mid-1960s, when he was working at a book firm, he started to call the whole scheme Xanadu.