Una pequeña muestra de las raíces contraculturales de la computación personal:

Computer Lib / Dream Machines (1974) is a Janus-like codex that joins two books back to back; in the middle, the texts of the two bound-together books meet. The “Computer Lib” side, its cover featuring a raised fist with a computer in the background, didn’t simply predict that personal computers were coming, but effectively challenged the popular notion of what computers were for, at a fundamental level.

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The volume’s other side, "Dream Machines", had even greater significance for new media’s development. Nelson wrote in the “Dream Machines” introduction, “Feel free to begin here. The other side is just if you want to know more about computers, which are changeable devices for twiddling symbols. Otherwise, skip it.” He wrote this believing his most essential message was not about computers, but about media and design. He believed the importance of computers lay not in their capacity for calculation, but in the fact that they would enable new generations of media.

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Second, Nelson proposed that these new, designed media experiences be placed in a radical, open publishing network. A network that supported the reconfiguration, comparison, and interconnection of his 1965 hypertext proposal, in addition to complex version management and powerful user interface conventions. In pages reprinted here, he envisions the resulting explosion of knowledge radically altering the daily experiences of everyone from students to scientists. This vision and the project to realize it —Xanadu— made Nelson the butt of jokes for 20 years: he was called a crackpot (and worse) for his strong conviction that Xanadu’s fundamentals represented the future of media and culture. The general belief was that there simply was not demand for a public, hypertext-enabled publishing network. This belief was resisted, however, by small groups around the world who created and worked with various types of hypertext-enabled networks. Although we have not yet reached Xanadu, when one of these systems, the World Wide Web, began to explode in popularity during the 1990s.

Extractos del librito:

3. MENTAL ENVIRONMENTS are working places for structured activity. The same principles of showmanship apply to a working environment as to both the contents of media and the design of media. If media are environments into which packaged materials are brought, structured environments are basically environments where you use nonpackaged material, or create things yourself. They might also be called “contentless media.” The principles of wholeness in structured environments are the same as for the others, and many of our examples refer to them.

The branching computer screen, together with the selfsame computer’s ability to turn anything else on and off as selected by the user, and to fetch up information, yields a realm of option in the design of media and environment that has never existed before.


We are approaching a screen apocalypse. The author’s basic view is that RESPONSIVE COMPUTER DISPLAY SYSTEMS CAN, SHOULD AND WILL RESTRUCTURE AND LIGHT UP THE MENTAL LIFE OF MANKIND.


Our greatest problems involve thinking and the visualization of complexity. By “Thinkertoy” I mean, first of all, a system to help people think. (‘Toy’ means it should be easy and fun to use.) This is the same general idea for which Engelbart, for instance, uses the term “augmentation of intellect.” But a Thinkertoy is something quite specific: I define it as a computer display system that helps you envision complex alternatives. [extractos] [escaneadas]

Una influencia:

And to a great extent, that came out of the philosophical resonances that Stewart Brand sort of promulgated through the Whole Earth Catalog. He had the notion that you could take tools that might be used by the establishment and you could turn around and use them for community. And that really caught on and resonated with a large group of people. In particular, Ted Nelson's book on Dream Machines intentionally mimicked the style of Brand's book. Or, for example, Alan Kay, the computer scientist at Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center) who invented the first truly modern experimental personal computer, walked into the Xerox corporate library one day with a copy of Whole Earth Catalog and told the librarian to buy all the books in it. Brand was that influential. [link] [link] [link] [link]

Fred Moore y el Homebrew Computer Club:

NEOFILES: Fred Moore is like the real hardcore, authentic, radical dude in your book, right from the start. He really struggles with conscience and is very involved with politics and pacifism. Tell people a little bit about is trajectory, because he's there throughout your whole story.

JM: That was definitely my intention. Fred Moore died in a car accident in 1997, and what was so striking is that there was not even an obituary when he died. He did two things I think are really significant. One was that, as a freshman, he staged a sit-in, a one-man protest on the steps of Sproul Plaza in the fall of 1959 against mandatory ROTC. It lasted about two days. People in some sense didn't know that this type of political protests was possible. His dad, a military man, came out from the east coast and dragged him home, but Fred's act had this impact. People who, just 4 years later, would start the free speech movement saw Fred Moore make an individual stand of conscience and they realized one person could make a difference.

The Homebrew club was the stomping ground of Jobs and Wozniak. So as the story goes on, he goes to jail. He's a draft resister. He comes back to the west coast in the early 1970s and he's hanging out around the Whole Earth truck store and he's running this project called "The Information Network" which is all about bringing different alternative community groups together. He's doing it on a 3 x 5 file card box, but he's a computer hobbyist. He discovered computers, and he realizes if he has a database it will be much more efficient. So he has this hunger to have his own computer, but he's too poor to have access to a computer. So he gets this idea, he's hanging out around the "People's Computer Company" in Menlo Park and he gets this idea that we can have a hobbyist group and make our own computers. And the idea gets a little out of hand. Out of the Homebrew Computer Club came more than two dozen companies including Apple computer and a number of others that have transformed into this modern personal computer industry. [link!] [link] [link]

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Based on the evidence Markoff presents, there is much to this. The most recent ancestors of modern PCs were the kit-based computers beloved by hobbyists in the mid-1970s (a favorite model was the Altair 8800), and one of the centers of the hobby movement was Menlo Park's own Homebrew Computer Club, founded in 1975 by peace activist Fred Moore. Homebrewers swapped software and components and advised each other on how to build computers from the ground up -- a do-it-yourself ethos with close links both to the Whole Earth Catalog phenomenon and to the ideas of radical educator Ivan Illich, who believed that technology should be limited to the human scale.

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Pot is smoked freely in Engelbart's lab (causing his researchers increasingly to be seen as "stoned goofballs" by the other scientists at SRI), and brilliant programmers and writers drop acid with near abandon. The author even recounts how Apple founder Steve Jobs once told him that "taking LSD was one of the two or three most important things he had done in his life." [link] [link] [link] [link] [link] [link] [link]

Volviendo a Ted Nelson:

Nelson is a pale, angular, and energetic man who wears clothes with lots of pockets. In these pockets he carries an extraordinary number of items. What cannot fit in his pockets is attached to his belt. It is not unusual for him to arrive at a meeting with an audio recorder and cassettes, video camera and tapes, red pens, black pens, silver pens, a bulging wallet, a spiral notebook in a leather case, an enormous key ring on a long, retractable chain, an Olfa knife, sticky notes, assorted packages of old receipts, a set of disposable chopsticks, some soy sauce, a Pemmican Bar, and a set of white, specially cut file folders he calls "fangles" that begin their lives as 8 1/2-by-11-inch envelopes, are amputated en masse by a hired printer, and end up as integral components in Nelson's unique filing system. This system is an amusement to his acquaintances until they lend him something, at which point it becomes an irritation. "If you ask Ted for a book you've given him," says Roger Gregory, Nelson's longtime collaborator and traditional victim, "he'll say, 'I filed it, so I'll buy you a new one.'" For a while, Nelson wore a purple belt constructed out of two dog collars, which pleased him immensely, because he enjoys finding innovative uses for things.

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I was already taping our conversation, but Nelson clearly wanted his own record. Not because he was concerned about being quoted correctly, but because his tape recorder and video camera are weapons in an unending battle against amnesia. The inventor suffers from an extreme case of Attention Deficit Disorder, a recently named psychological syndrome whose symptoms include unusual sensitivity to interruption.

If he is stopped in the middle of anything, he forgets it instantly. Only by running his own tape recorder could Nelson be confident that his words would not float off, irrecoverably, into the atmosphere.

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Xanadu, the ultimate hypertext information system, began as Ted Nelson's quest for personal liberation. The inventor's hummingbird mind and his inability to keep track of anything left him relatively helpless. He wanted to be a writer and a filmmaker, but he needed a way to avoid getting lost in the frantic multiplication of associations his brain produced. His great inspiration was to imagine a computer program that could keep track of all the divergent paths of his thinking and writing. To this concept of branching, nonlinear writing, Nelson gave the name hypertext.

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Nelson's hatred of conventional structure made him difficult to educate. Bored and disgusted by school, he once plotted to stab his seventh-grade teacher with a sharpened screwdriver, but lost his nerve at the last minute and instead walked out of the classroom, never to return. On his long walk home, he came up with the four maxims that have guided his life: most people are fools, most authority is malignant, God does not exist, and everything is wrong. Nelson loves these maxims and repeats them often. They lead him to sympathize, in every discussion, with the rejected idea and the discounted option.

By the time Nelson reached college, his method of combating the regularity chauvinists was quite sophisticated; he put his teachers off with the theories of writer Alfred Korzybski, who denounced all categories as misleading. But this hatred of categories did not produce in Nelson a fuzzy, be-here-now mysticism. On the contrary, Nelson loved words, which were tools for memory, but he hated the way that traditional writing and editing imposed a false and limiting order. Nelson had no interest in the smooth, progressive narratives encased in books. He wanted everything to be preserved in all its chaotic flux, so that it could be reconstructed as needed.

Nelson, a lonely child raised in an unconventional family, became a rebel against forgetting, and a denier of all forms of loss and grief. (Some of Nelson's disciples would one day take this war against loss even further, and devote themselves to the development of cryonic technology for the freezing and preservation of corpses.) Tormented by his own faulty memory, Nelson developed the habit of asserting that only a technology for the preservation of all knowledge could prevent the destruction of life on Earth. The thought that some mental connection or relationship might dissolve was unbearable. Not only was the constant churn and dispersal of his own thoughts personally devastating, but the general human failure to remember was, Nelson thought, suicidal on a global scale, for it condemned humanity to an irrational repetition of its mistakes. [link!] [link] [link] [link] [link]