In Venting, a Computer Visionary Educates 

By JOHN MARKOFF
Published: January 10, 2009 

BEFORE the personal computer, and before the Web, there was Theodor Holm Nelson, who almost half a century ago understood how computers would transform the printed page. 

Mr. Nelson anticipated and inspired the World Wide Web, and he coined the term “hypertext,” which embodies the idea of linking a web of objects including text, audio and video. 

In his self-published new book, “Geeks Bearing Gifts: How the Computer World Got This Way” (available on lulu.com), Mr. Nelson, 71, takes stock of the computing world. The look back by this forward-thinking man is not without its bitterness. The Web, after all, can be seen as a bastardization of his original notion that hyperlinks should point both forward and backward.

Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, organized all the world’s content through a one-way mechanism of uniform source locators, or URLs. Lost in the process was Mr. Nelson’s two-way link concept that simultaneously pointed to the content in any two connected documents, protecting, he has argued in vain, the original intellectual lineage of any object. 

One-way links can be easily broken, and there is no simple way to preserve authorship and credit, as was possible with a project called Xanadu that Mr. Nelson began in the 1960s. His two-way links might have avoided the Web’s tornado-like destruction of the economic value of the printed word, he has contended, by incorporating a system of micropayments.

A generation of young computer enthusiasts who grew up in the 1960s and 1970s was deeply influenced by Mr. Nelson’s ideas. In 1974, his book “Computer Lib: You Can and Must Understand Computers Now,” was a call to arms to reinvent computing.

The book was written as a pastiche, in the tradition of the “Whole Earth Catalog” and as a paper-based placeholder for the Xanadu system that he believed would inevitably take hold. The book was seductive fun. It was actually two books in one: beginning on opposite covers, it could be read forward and backward, with the book on the opposite side titled “Dream Machines: New Freedoms Through Computer Screens — a Minority Report.”

The book provided an exhilarating peek into the world foretold by the arrival of personal computing, which was just then being invented at the Palo Alto Research Center of Xerox. It offered the first hint that computing would become something more than the control systems associated with the mainframe computing era of “do not bend, fold, spindle or mutilate.”

Computers, we learned, would no longer be hulking behemoths controlled by a priest class — they were something we could get our hands on. They would become fantasy amplifiers, and would augment our pencils and papers and electric typewriters.

Three and a half decades later, the cover of “Geeks Bearing Gifts” certainly grabs the eye.

There is a shaggy, grinning and bespectacled Bill Gates in a mug shot. It was reportedly taken in 1977 in the wake of a speeding arrest, several years after Mr. Gates helped found his software business. Like others of his generation, Mr. Gates borrowed many of Mr. Nelson’s ideas and implemented them in what would become the world’s largest software company.

On the inside cover of “Geeks,” Mr. Nelson asks why Mr. Gates is smiling in the photograph. The reason, he concludes, is that the young entrepreneur hasn’t a care in the world — and that he already knows the future will be bright.

His intent is not to malign Mr. Gates, he said. “This is perhaps the most charming and winsome picture of him,” he said, “radiating sweetness and warmth and confidence.”

“However, you can also tell he’s up to something — and the cops don’t have a clue what it is,” Mr. Nelson added. “Only we, looking at this picture in hindsight, know what his gifts were going to be.”

What then of Mr. Nelson, who was also a computer industry pioneer, but who did not become the world’s richest man?

Despite the fact that he had an original and prophetic vision of the future, Mr. Nelson has remained an outsider in an industry that has showered great wealth on many of his contemporaries. 

The son of the director Ralph Nelson and the actress Celeste Holm, he grew up in Greenwich Village, went to college at Swarthmore in the 1950s and then studied sociology with Talcott Parsons at Harvard.

His unfinished software project, Xanadu, grew out of his 1960 insight that paper would inevitably be replaced by computer screens. For several decades he continued to labor on the project — for a while at Autodesk, the engineering-oriented software publisher. More recently he has lived in Asia and Europe, where his work has generally been more deeply appreciated than in his native country.

Last year, he returned to the United States to finish his history. In “Geeks,” he settles some old scores and sets down his own version of the history of computing.

He wrote in a recent e-mail message: “I have long been alarmed by people’s sheeplike acceptance of the term ‘computer technology’ — it sounds so objective and inexorable — when most computer technology is really a bunch of ideas turned into conventions and packages.” His quarrel is with the dominance of “packages” like Microsoft Office and Windows, which he argues are the arbitrary result of business practices and not the inevitable result of technology evolution.

Some readers might regard Mr. Nelson as railing against those he sees as golddiggers who cherry-picked and perverted his ideas while ignoring his grander ideals. Years later, he is still obviously wounded by an unsympathetic 1995 profile in Wired that belittled his quest for Xanadu and suggested that it was quixotic.

The computing world, however, forgets its past at its peril. Indeed, it may be worthwhile for the self-congratulatory computing industry not only to read Mr. Nelson’s new book closely, but also to take another look at his more recent software design ideas. They may still point the way forward.

Consider Zig-Zag, Mr. Nelson’s foray into the world of databases. When I saw it years ago, it seemed to offer only an impossibly baroque interface. Only recently did I realize that he had simply anticipated the emergence of the semantic Web, now viewed by many computer researchers as the next step past Internet search. Mr. Nelson also has an intriguing redesign of the basic text editor that merits more exposure.

Why not? You are already using one very compelling invention, one that he calls a “tchotchke” and claims that he came up with decades ago. It’s the Web browser back button. 

=30=