| "The shadow of the dome of pleasure Floated midway on the waves; Where was heard the mingled measure From the fountain and the caves.
It was a miracle of rare device..."
IF YOU ARE READING THIS PAGE, then you are already an acolyte of Ted Nelson's religion -- a theology built not out of words or ideas exactly, but of references and links. The idea of "hypertext," a term first coined by Nelson in 1965, may have been sketched in various forms before, but its first wild exegesis came in 1981 with Nelson's manifesto, Literary Machines.
"Forty years from now (if the human species survives), there will be hundreds of thousands of files servers," Nelson wrote in the prelude. "And there will be hundreds of millions of simultaneous users...All this is manifest destiny. There is no point in arguing it, either you see it or you don't." Less than two decades later, the Web has made much of his ambitious speculations commonplace: textual links stringing together a global net of file servers, traversed by millions of users.
Structured like a collection of brilliant Post-It notes, Literary Machines details the construction of his master-machine, a encyclopedic nest of information called "Xanadu." (Nelson released multiple beta versions, but never a final product.) The network of inter and intra-connected documents was to be the ultimate research device, development tool, cultural event -- as well as a financial boon for the authors whose work resided on it. Nelson explicitly imagined Xanadu as the first real incarnation of Vannevar Bush's Memex device. (See our Document on Bush from last year.) Reading Literary Machines, you can't help feel the need for the system Nelson lays out: the mad organization of the book itself -- with its restless transitions and MacDraw diagrams unhappily jailed on the page -- makes its own great case for "Xanadu."
But what makes Literary Machines important is not just how much Nelson foresaw, but what we have yet to see. For this Document, we've selected four elements of his design that have yet to be explored, places where Nelson built windows before there was a house. We've asked acclaimed novelist and hypertext theorist Robert Coover (The Baby Sitter), hypertext author Mark Amerika (The Grammatron), and MIT scholar Janet Murray (Hamlet on the Holodeck) to comment on these excerpts, and we've included extensive links to related readings at FEED and elsewhere on the Web. As is always the case at FEED, links in the main text of the piece pop open a new "MetaLink" window, which provides an expanded definition of a term, or some other supplementary material. Links in the margins take you to our panel's commentary, or to other articles on related subjects. Most importantly, we're using the publication of this Document to roll out the latest version of The Loop, which features better sorting and more intuitive navigation. We hope you will use The Loop to respond to both the original Nelson text, and the commentary we've assembled here.
-- Austin Bunn
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