CONNECTICUT LIBRARIES
November 1996, Vol. 38, No. 10

Ted Nelson and the All-Purpose Machine
Computer Lib (& Dream Machines) by Ted Nelson
A Review by Vince Juliano

Inspired in part by the plot line of a recent Dilbert cartoon, I cranked up my time machine for a visit to the computer worlds of 1974 and 1987, with a brief stopover in 1975. Actually, I neither own, nor have access to a time machine. So instead, I picked up a classic book by personal computer visionary Ted Nelson. Although I was familiar with some of Nelson's ideas, I had never read his often-cited book. The book is really two books. You start with Computer Lib (copyright 1974, '75, '87), and when you finish it, you flip it over, and there you find Dream Machines. Poor catalogers! But, remember, we're back in the seventies. People did things like that. You may recall the Whole Earth Catalog, the format of which inspired the layout of this volume.

It is my almost daily meandering on the World Wide Web that has drawn me to Computer Lib. You see, many writers give Ted Nelson credit for the development of hypertext. (Others argue that Douglas Engelbart deserves most of the credit, but no one denies that Nelson wrote extensively and preached "evangelically" about it). It is, of course, hypertext that takes us through cyberspace from one World Wide Web document to another at the "click" of a mouse.

Several years ago, while working on one of Connecticut's many networking task forces, long before Mosaic and Netscape had transformed and popularized the Web, I read about Xanadu, Ted Nelson's dream project. Nelson envisioned, in 1974, an affordable computer service that would deliver information and entertainment into people's homes. According to Nelson (Dream Machines, p. 144), Xanadu would "give you a screen in your home from which you can see into the world's hypertext libraries... offer high-performance computer graphics and text services at a price anyone can afford... allow you to send and receive written messages... [and] make you a part of a new electronic literature and art, where you can get all your questions answered..." He proposed all of that in 1974: before the Web, before Windows, before IBM dreamed of building a computer that wasn't a main frame, before Bill Gates left Harvard to found Microsoft, before the two Steves built the first Apple, even before the world's first personal computer (the Altair) was advertised on the cover of Popular Electronics.

Ted Nelson wrote Computer Lib at a time when IBM dominated computer sales and computer thinking. People saw computers as cold and impersonal. Professionals in authoritarian computer information departments controlled access to computers owned by large businesses and universities. Computer Lib was a revolutionary manifesto calling for the liberation of computers and for the liberation of people through computers. For Ted Nelson, computers were "All-Purpose Machines" that could control almost any other machine. Their use should be limited only by our own imaginations. Ted Nelson saw that potential, as well as dropping prices of computer equipment, and he had the temerity to advocate personal ownership of computers.

While it is fun to review Nelson's "predictions" about computers and check his excellent batting average, let me instead list some of his observations about computers and people. The reader can decide for her-/himself how relevant those observations are today.

Time to return to 1996.

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