Literary Machines
Book description
Ted Nelson's visionary 1980 book, which defined the term "hypertext" and foretold the Worldwide Web. A rare and historic book.
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Why read it?
1 author picked Literary Machines as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?
The famously mercurial Nelson has been writing about the possibilities of networked information since the 1960s.
Indeed, he first coined the term “hypertext” in 1965. In Literary Machines (first published in 1981), he proposed a hypertext system dubbed Xanadu (after Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s famous “vision in a dream”), a new kind of networked system that would serve as a repository of all the world’s knowledge.
He proposed that users could connect related documents together via “jump links,” embed content from one document into another via what he called “transclusion,” and even explored the possibilities of micropayments.
Nelson’s pioneering work won…
From Alex's list on forgotten pioneers of the Internet.
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