The Internet has come a long way since the dial up days of AOL. Wifi and 3G are commonplace now and hardlines are used now only for a greater bandwidth. We can now download an upload almost anywhere in the world from our pockets.

This is the result of the Internet and the World Wide Web, and although now the notion of this kind of interconnectivity is commonplace, 30 years ago it seemed a space-age prospect. When Ted Nelson was sharing his thoughts on hypertext culture and ‘Project Xanadu’ (essentially a prototype Internet), he was also confessing his skepticism that humanity would even survive to see his predictions realized.

Hypertext is “non-sequential writing – text that branches and allows choices to the reader, best read at an interactive screen” (Nelson). Nelson highlighted this mode of information sharing as the way of the future. He outlined a world in which offices, businesses, and even homes may be paper-less, instead they would be filled with compters.

Nelson praised computers as instruments to simplify human life (simplification was something that he pushed in many different cases pertaining to computers) and the way to do this was to connect them, making information transfer almost seamless. This vision was realised, in a way, through the Internet.

References: Nelson, Theodor Holm. Literary Machines 91.1: The Report On, and Of, Project Xanadu Concerning Word Processing, Electronic Publishing, Hypertext, Thinkertoys, Tomorrow’s Intellectual Revolution, And Certain Other Topics Including Knowledge, Education and Freedom. Sausalito: Mindful Press, 1992. Print.