When we look at the past of computerdom, it’s through a lens which is very peculiar because things have changed so much, so fast. To me, those fifty years that I’ve been in the computer field have gone so quickly that the past seems ever present. In the 60s and 70s, a lot of young people started communes, and it was a combination of free love - which is a term you don’t hear anymore because we take it for granted - and pot, and LSD, and idealism, and hopes for a new kind of economy, and that spirit of that age leaked into the computer world. There was a sense of possibility in the beginning that is different because we thought that computing would be artisinal. We did not imagine great monopolies… we thought the citizen programmer would be the leader. When I say we, I mean I, but of course I had a sense I was sharing this with a lot of people. The visions of democratization, of citizen participation, created vistas of possibility for artistic expression and artistic expression in software. And software is an art form, though not generally recognized as such. And because of Moore’s Law - which had been stated to me not as Moore’s Law, but just as a general principle, things were going to get faster and cheaper - we will be able to afford it. Right now, a computer with a screen is $35,000, tomorrow, who knows, it’ll be a $100, something.Sso that now is the time to start thinking about what would be the documents of the future. As I would abstract it now, the two concepts were: we can have parallel connections between visible documents. So you can have two pages with a connection saying, “this sentence is connected to that paragraph,” and so there’s a visible strap or bridge, and you can’t do that yet. So that was one of my hypertext concepts. And the other hypertext concept was to be able to click on something, and jump to it. So as the hypertext concept developed - and deteriorated - over the years, only the jump link became popular in the hypertext systems in the 60s and 70s. And then Tim Berners Lee created the World Wide Web… which was the sixth or seventh hypertext system on the internet. People think it sprang from (unintelligible, please help) but it was just a clean job that had the clout of CERN behind it. How to see the possibilities when there are so many things around you that are in a certain way… I don’t know. The future is an unknown place, and there are a lot of scary things about it. And what aspects you’re going to approach, whether you’re going to go on thinking about leisure, or about the terrible problems that confront the world, all I can say is: close your eyes. And think what might be. My first software designs were largely done with my eyes closed, thinking, “Now if I hit that key, what should happen, if I hit this key, what should happen.” I was able to imagine - they say this can’t be done - but when my interfaces were built, they always felt the way I knew they would. And the people at Xerox PARC said, “That’s never possible, you never know how it’s going to feel.” But I did.
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