thanks for posting this. I read his double-book "Dream Machines / Computer Lib" when it came out: it changed my perspective on the future of computing from numbers and mathematics to narrative and media.<p>I heard him speak perhaps 15 years ago now at a Computer Literacy bookstore event and he was a little cranky but extremely insightful. I remember two key points he made that I still value:<p>1. We need to shift our thinking from an "educational curriculum" to a reticulum (or network) that emphasizes the connectedness of topics and concepts and teach students to learn how to learn through exploration as much as rote and replay.<p>2. Read Mark Twain's "Roughing It" for insights into Silicon Valley entrepreneurship.<p>EDIT: more info including a summary of "pre-history chapters" available at <a href="http://geeks-bearing-gifts.com/" rel="nofollow">http://geeks-bearing-gifts.com/</a>
Ted Nelson was a part of the orthodoxy in proscribing rich tightly-bound hypertext. There were dozens of projects, but none of them were anything but sandboxes at best.<p>The web succeded only because it was nothing like Xanadu, and Ted still can't get over that.<p>Self-contained systems like wikis would be a great place for rich Xanadu-like features, but MediaWiki hopelessly squandered that possibility. There are a few systems that approach it (tiddlywiki does some cool shit), but for most people Wikipedia's decrepit software has grounded their conception of what wikis can be in mediocrity.