User:Natasa Siencnik/notes/nelson/

Abstract

Ted Machines: Computer Lib. Dream Machines. Tempus Books of Microsoft Press, 1974.

Computer Lib

• attempt to explain why computers are "marvelous and wonderful"
  
• personal freedom through understanding computers
  

Dream Machines

• about fantasy and imagination, and new technologies for it
  
• new understanding and new arts through graphics and interaction
  

Computer Terms of the 70s

• online > connected to a functioning computer
• offline > setting things up for processing later
• remote > reffering to somethin far away
• local > right where you are
• front end > whatever stands between user and system
• dedicated > set up for only one use
• turnkey > turned on with a key
• real-time > responding to events without delays
• user-oriented > set up for users, not programmers
• user level > person without knowledge about computers but uses the system
• good-guy system > friendly, helpful, simple naive-user systems
• stand-alone system > system which doesn't need to be attached to sth else

Comments

From: Randall Packer / Ken Jordan (Ed.): Multimedia. From Wagner to Virtual Reality. Norton & Company, 2001, p. 155.

Ted Nelson describes himself as a person who invents paradigms and then makes up words to express them. Nelson had little formal training in computer science. However, as a graduate student in philosophy in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Nelson had two critical intellectual encounters that led him to become one of the most influential figures in computing. One was with Vannevar Bush's article "As We May Think", which convinced Nelson that emerging information technologies could extend the power of human memory. The second was with Samuel Taylor Coleridge's poem "Xanadu", "a magic place of literary memory", in nelson's words, that provided him with the image of a vast storehouse of memories […]. From these influences, Nelson began his quest to build creative tools that would transform the way we read and write, and in 1963 he coined the words hypertext and hypermedia to describe the new paradigms that these tools would make possible.
In 1974, he self-published his landmark tome on personal computing, Computer Lib/Dream Machines, which instantly drew an underground following of computer hackers, media theorists, and experimental artists. The oversized volume had a playful, do-it-yourself quality, with typesetting done by typewriter, distinctive hand-drawn illustrations, and a layout that suggested the nonlinear nature of hypermedia. […] Nelson was particularly concerned with the complex nature of the creative impulse, and he saw the computer as the tool that would make explicit the interdependence of ideas, drawing out connections between literature, art, music, and science, since, as he put it, everything is "deeply intertwingled".