blogmywiki discusses the 50th anniversary of the 1974 book Computer Lib / Dream Machines by Ted Nelson.
Who is Ted Nelson, and why does a fifty-year-old book on computing matter today? Ted Nelson is probably best-known as the man behind Xanadu, a wildly ambitious hypertext system he first described in the 1960s and has been tinkering with ever since. In a 1995 article, Wired magazine called it ‘the longest-running vapourware project in the history of computing.’ As far as I know, almost thirty years later, it still hasn’t shipped (although Ted Nelson is still alive.)
Computer Lib / Dream Machines is, even by the standards of its age, an odd book. Self-published by Nelson in 1974, its appearance is shambolic but oddly charming, like a samizdat political pamphlet or fanzine. Its hand-drawn headlines, typewritten text at odd angles is reminiscent of early editions of the British satirical magazine Private Eye. It is, in fact, two books in one. Which book you started reading depending on which way you picked it up, as they were printed back to back.
Computer Lib is more of a political or social manifesto, a treatise on what computing had become whereas Dream Machines looks ahead to what computing could become, focusing on computers as machines for manipulating and creating visual arts and writing.
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