Enter Nelson’s article, the first For Dummies guide to computing. This article also reminds me of the Video Professor. I’m sure everyone has seen this guy (YouTube below if you haven’t). Anyway, this guy drives me crazy. Plus, he's probably crazy rich.

All kidding aside , while reading Nelson, I am attempting to teleport back over thirty years, before the invention of graphical user interfaces, even before the introduction of the mouse. I like Nelson. I like, although he is too arrogant to admit, that he envisioned the idea of hypertext and how his vision helped, to a modest degree, create today’s global internetwork of computers (for good or bad). However, I believe what Nelson was attempting in this article was incredibly idealistic (even for him).

When reading Nelson, we cannot disregard the historical context from which he is writing. To me, this is more important than his elaborate illustrations of what and how computer programs will be used within CAI.  A quick summary of most widely publicized home computer will look to put things into perspective.

1975 - Altair 8800 (provided by http://fusionanomaly.net/altair8800.html )

The January edition of Popular Electronics featured the Altair 8800 computer kit, based on Intel's 8080 microprocessor, on its cover. Within weeks of the computer's debut, customers inundated the manufacturing company, MITS, with orders. Bill Gates and Paul Allen licensed BASIC as the software language for the Altair. Ed Roberts invented the 8800 -- which sold for $297, or $395 with a case -- and coined the term "personal computer." The machine came with 256 bytes of memory (expandable to 64K) and an open 100-line bus structure that internal linkevolved into the S-100 standard. In 1977, MITS sold out to Pertec, which continued producing Altairs through 1978.

Good luck to the average computer buyer in 1975! Where the hell is the monitor & keyboard?

But hell, his Computer Lib / Dream Machines did inspire the creator of Lotus 1-2-3, dubbed the first “killer PC application”. Lotus 1-2-3 was a user-friendly spreadsheet that became a must have business application. Why? Because almost anybody could use it; a concept reverberated continuously across Nelson’s article.

See Nelson, while you were wasting your life away on Xanadu, people were out fulfilling your Dream Machine!