The heart of connection
Theodor Holm Nelson · Communications of the ACM · 1995
I can imagine few honors greater than a facing page to Douglas Engelbart's; he is one of the great men of our century and I love him dearly.Like Doug I have had a unified vision, of which today's popular attainments are only centerless shadows of the edge.But I have till now had little basis for conversation with the computer mainstream.Coining words has hardly helped (e.g., hypertext, hypermedia, transclusion).Let me begin again, for few have understood.After college, wishing to work alone as rogue philosopher and film-maker, I was troubled about distribution for self-publishing and how to manage notes and threads for many projects.Then I took a computer course.Philosophically, I saw that the computer was a clockwork of arbitrary abstractions designable any which way; cinematically, I saw it would become the theater of all media turned interactive.These two angles fused into a stereo perspective pointing far beyond.What would be the best underlying abstractions