21. Computer Lib
/Dream Machines
1974
301
;
21.
[Introduction]
From
Computer Lib / Dream Machines
Computer Lib / Dream Machines is the most important book in the history of new media.
Nelson’s volume is often called the first personal computer book, probably because it arrived shortly
before the first personal computer kit (the Altair) and was later recognized to have predicted the
effects of its coming. This, however, was only one of the many visions, prescient and influential,
offered in the volume.
Computer Lib / Dream Machines 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. As Stewart Brand wrote in his foreword to the 1987 edition, Ted Nelson is “accurately depicted
as the Tom Paine of the personal-computer revolution. His 1974 tract, Computer Lib / Dream
Machines, had the same effect as Paine’s Common Sense—it captivated readers, informed them, and
set them debating and eventually marching, rallying around a common cause many of them hadn’t
realized was so worthy or even a cause before. . . . The enemy was Central Processing, in all its
commercial, philosophical, political, and socio-economic manifestations. Big Nurse.” Nelson’s book
raised the cry, “Down with Cybercrud!” He exhorted his readers to defy the computer priesthood,
and its then-leader IBM, and to never accept, “The computer doesn’t work that way” as an answer
again. “Computer Lib” was in writing what the Altair and Apple II became in engineering: an artifact
that destabilized the existing computer order, that brought about a conception of the computer as a
personal device.
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. In
the pages that followed, Nelson reported on some of the most important work in new media up to
that time, such as that of Doug Engelbart (
◊08, ◊16) and Ivan Sutherland (◊09), and set forth his
own unique twofold vision.
First, he argued that computer experiences were media to be designed, and that this design
should be both a creative process and undertaken with the audience (users) in mind. His most
stirring essay on the subject (“Fantics”) is reprinted here, along with a small selection of Nelson’s
own designs. These are founding documents for the field now called human-computer interaction.
They caused Nelson’s book to be passed around, borrowed, stolen, and made a totemic object in
early new media businesses. One former Apple Computer designer tells the story of having a copy
of CL/DM placed in her hand the first day she reported for work.
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 (
◊11), 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
Mitch Kapor, Designer of
Lotus 1-2-3, Cofounder of
the Electronic Frontier
Foundation:
I spent a lot of the early
1970’s prowling around the
bookstores and newsstands
of Harvard Square. By day,
I was a very junior
computer programmer and
occasional teacher of
Transcendental Meditation.
I stumbled upon Computer
Lib on a nocturnal
excursion and was instantly
bewitched. Here was a man
who dreamed my dreams
before I did, who gave
voice to a radically
different concept of
computers as other than
giant calculating machines.
Computer Lib inspired me
as no other book has
before or since and
sustained me over the next
few years until I bought
my first Apple II. It
pointed me in the direction
of a career in the as-yet
then-uninvented field of
personal computers. For
which I am eternally
grateful.
◊
09
109
◊
08
93
◊
11
133
◊
16
231
21. Computer Lib
/Dream Machines
the
NEWMEDIA
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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 (
◊54), the voices of Nelson naysayers were
drowned forever in a flood of international hypertext publishing.
—NWF
Original Publication
Self-published, 1974. 2nd ed., Redmond, Washington: Tempus Books/Microsoft Press, 1987.
Dream Machines (2)
:
It matters because we live
in media, as fish live in
water. (Many people are
prisoners of the media,
many are manipulators, and
many want to use them to
communicate artistic
visions.)
But today, at this moment,
we can and must design
the media, design the
molecules of our new water,
and I believe the details of
this design matter very
deeply. They will be with us
for a very long time,
perhaps as long as man has
left; perhaps if they are as
good as they can be, man
may buy even more time—
or the open-ended future
most suppose remains.
Further Reading
Nelson, Ted. “A Conceptual
Framework for Man-Machine
Everything.”
Proceedings
AFIPS National Computer
Conference and Exposition
M21-M26, June 4–8, 1973,
New York. Montvale, N.J.:
AFIPS Press, 1973.
Nelson, Ted. “The Right Way
to Think about Software
Design.” The Art of Human-
Computer Interface Design,
235–243. Ed. Brenda Laurel.
Reading, Mass.: Addison-
Wesley. 1990.
Rheingold, Howard. Tools for
Thought: The People and
Ideas Behind the Next
Computer Revolution. New
York: Simon & Schuster,
1985; Cambridge: MIT Press,
2000.
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