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The Whole Earth Catalog’s busy, sprawling format was copied by numerous authors and innovators in the 1970s. The publication’s homemade cut-and-paste quality, often utilizing different typefaces and texts rotated in opposing directions, became a recognizable standard for creativity, free thought, and challenging the status quo.

One of the most influential adapters of this style on the West Coast was Nelson, Ted Ted Nelson (1937– ), author of the iconic idea and design book Computer Lib/Dream Machines (1974). It is not an overstatement to say that this book and its positive message about computers and computer literacy changed computing history.²⁵

Ted Nelson was a prolific writer and inventor who studied philosophy and sociology, composed a rock-and-roll musical, made films, taught in the humanities, consulted in corporate and academic contexts, and completed distinctive work as an artist and designer. While Stewart Brand did not make many overt connections to computer technology in Whole Earth Catalog, Nelson oozed enthusiasm for computing in his writings, using his self-published Computer Lib/Dream Machines as a call to action for learning about computers and leveraging their power for good. As Nelson’s ideas and enthusiasm attracted followers, he settled in the San Francisco Bay Area, making friends with engineers and inventors at the Home Brew Computer Club, Stanford Research Institute, and other high-tech hubs. Nelson would pursue a fascinating career in computing as a visionary and futurist, coining the term Hypertext hypertext (text on a computer screen linked to webs of other texts), and envisioning a graphical, compound-document system that he called Xanadu Xanadu. Hypertext and compound-documents would eventually be adopted in a variety of contexts in the computing world, including Tim Berners-Lee’s implementation of the World Wide Web. I am grateful for Dr. Nelson’s gift of an unpublished photograph from his collection for this book (see Figure 2.6). Computing mythologiesintertwingularity

Computer Lib/Dream Machines was published just before the introduction of PCs, but the revolutionary nature of Individualized computing “individualized computing” was clearly anticipated in Nelson’s book. For this reason, it is helpful to define Personal computing “personal computing” as an interactive experience with computers that may include users on time-sharing systems as well as individuals using microcomputers or later personal computers.

Figure 2.6Detail of Ted Nelson (reclining) with members of the Project Xanadu group, 1981. (Photo from the collection of Ted Nelson and used with his permission)

Like Whole Earth Catalog, Computer Lib/Dream Machines is a compendium of information, organized in eclectic fashion around loosely-connected themes. The book’s two titles are a reference to the way that the author presented his material—in overlapping, intertwining sections. In essence, there are two books bound together in one volume. You read Computer Lib to the book’s mid-point or “pivot” page, and then you flip the book and read Dream Machines until you reach the end of Computer Lib. It is not necessary (or even useful) to read the book sequentially, however; the seemingly random organization of topics serves to emphasize the interconnected nature of information and its mystical intertwingularity, a term Nelson coined to express the complexity of interrelations among all forms of human knowledge.²⁶ For these theoretical ideas, Nelson is also recognized as a seminal figure in modern information theory and design. Computing mythologiesintertwingularity

As a document reflecting America’s technology culture in the mid-1970s, Computer Lib/Dream Machines projects a positive, upbeat vision of computing society, but it also finds space for diatribes against IBM, U.S. intelligence agencies, the incompatibilities of computer systems, commercial television, “cybercrud” (computer jargon that serves to confuse), and the “ticking time bomb” of global population growth. (For more on the last issue, see Bob Albrecht’s contemporary programming primer in Chapter 4.) Like the Whole Earth Catalog, Nelson adopts a countercultural point of view, but he offers technology as a way to improve the world, not abandon it. For Nelson, computers have fortuitously appeared as the next iteration in a long line of textual devices that have the potential to inform communities, expand the mind, and reunite people with their literary heritage. Interestingly, there is a strong liberal arts emphasis in his writing, evidenced through his deep appreciation for the classics of literature, art, history, sociology, psychology, biology, and mathematics.

Nelson came of age in the 1960s, and he knew firsthand about the “crisis” mythology surrounding corporate and government computing. He also recognized that the world of computers and software was changing rapidly. The 1974 edition of Computer Lib/Dream Machines envisioned a revolutionary computing context to be a terminal connected to a time-sharing system, providing interactive access to the mainframe’s software and data resources. In the 1987 version of the book (see Figure 2.7), Nelson revised his presentation to introduce the wide range of computing technologies, including the Altair microcomputer, the Apple II, various IBM PCs and compatibles, the Macintosh, new minicomputer systems, and platforms running CP/M, MS-DOS, Unix, and Macintosh Finder. Regardless of the device, however, Nelson argued that computers only become revolutionary when the user was put in charge of the device and its resources. An important aspect of this command and control included computer programming. “The world is divided,” Nelson intoned, “into people who have written a program and people who have not.”²⁷

Inspired by his influence, Stewart Brand described Ted Nelson as “the Tom Paine of the PC Revolution.”²⁸ Nelson spread the message that corporate computing had become paternalistic and compartmentalized to the point that users had been removed from the decision-making process. As a result, computing in America had become “an atrocious tangle of excellent incompatible pieces, well-intentioned Computing mythologiesintertwingularity incompatible junk, and inexcusable incompatible junk.” Like many visionaries, Nelson pointed out both a crisis and a solution:

Figure 2.7Computer Lib/Dream Machines, 1987 Edition, by Ted Nelson. (Used with permission from Microsoft)

We have to end this chaos. We have to re-unite the things that should never have been separate. We have to make it work for everybody. It is time indeed for real computer liberation.²⁹