In Venting, a Computer Visionary Educates

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.

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:

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.

2. Read Mark Twain's "Roughing It" for insights into Silicon Valley entrepreneurship.

EDIT: more info including a summary of "pre-history chapters" available at http://geeks-bearing-gifts.com/

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.

The web succeded only because it was nothing like Xanadu, and Ted still can't get over that.

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.