href="http://tprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/archive/00000011/01/zifty-d9.txt?xuversion=1.0&locspec=charrange:&mode=human">Way
Out of the Box ( s>http://tprints.ecs.soton.ac.ukq)
Today's computer constructs were made up in situations that ranged from
emergency to academia, which have been piled up into a seemingly meaningful
whole. Yet the world of the screen could be anything at all, not just the
imitation of paper. But everybody seems to think the basic designs are finished.
It's just like "Space, we've done that!" -- a few inches of exploration and some
people think it's over.....Today's arbitrarily constructed computer world is
also based on paper simulation, or WYSIWYG. That's where we're stuck in the
current model, where most software seems to be mapped to paper. ("WYSIWYG"
generally means "What You See is What You Get"-- meaning what you get *when you
print it OUT*). In other words, paper is the flat heart of most of today's
software concepts. --Theodore Nelson

Nelson writes "the screen could be anything at all, not just the imitation of
paper," but as Nick Montfort reminds us in his " href="http://nickm.com/writing/essays/continuous_paper.html">Continuous
Paper," computer culture was well-established before screens replaced the
rolls of paper streaming through print terminals and teletypes.

The document quoted above is an example of Nelson's version of a two-way web,
part of the "transquotation" concept in his Xanadu. His ideas challenge too many
people's notions of writing, ownership, and locality to catch on in the
mainstream (at least for now). The freak-your-mind possibilities of this
implementation of open-source text sound fantastic. I'm sure this has been
debated in the RSS/XML/Whatever debates that often gets A-list bloggers riled
up. I need to get a bigger job jar -- mine's overflowing as it is. But here's a
href="http://www.cf.ac.uk/jomec/vieira/alt.cyberkids/hypertexthistorymain.htm">light
piece about Xanadu and transclusion.