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Interviewer: ...PROGRAM TWO, THE RISE OF THE COMPUTER BUSINESS. 
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Interviewer: HERE WE ARE IN 1969, '70, '71, SOMEWHERE IN THERE. 
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Interviewer: WHAT WAS THE STATE OF THE COMPUTER BUSINESS, AND WHAT WERE SOME OF THE PROBLEMS?
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Nelson: The problem of computer access in the early '70s, well, there hardly was any, because you had to play ball with the computer centers. 
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Nelson: All the computers were big mainframes. 
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Nelson: Or we thought them big mainframes at the time. 
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Nelson: They were roughly the power of the very big mainframe then was smaller than this Macintosh.
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Nelson: Well, in the early '70s there was hardly any computer access at all. 
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Nelson: The only computers there were lived in fluorescent lit rooms on top of raised flooring in freezingly cold air-conditioned rooms, tended by a priesthood, and this was called the Computer Center. 
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Nelson: And in order to get into the Computer Center, you basically had to pass all the tests of the priesthood and play ball with the Computer Center and the way they worked. 
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Nelson: Essentially, well, there were a number of large computer manufacturers, but predominant was, of course, IBM, and the Computer Center management was essentially a captive bureaucracy that was an off-shoot of IBM. 
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Nelson: So that the people who ran the Computer Center usually had the IBM mentality. 
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Nelson: In fact, like many colonized people, imitating the psychology of their oppressors. 
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Nelson: And in order to get to use the computer you essentially had to be really playing ball. 
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Nelson: Now I speak with a certain bitterness because in the early '70s I tried to get... 
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Nelson: I was on projects at places like the University of Illinois trying to get computer graphic stuff [TELEPHONE RINGS] I had some bitter experiences in this regard, one notable one being about 1972, when I and a colleague were trying to get some computer graphic equipment in at the University of Illinois. 
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Nelson: And we talked to the Computer Center people, and it became increasingly clear — we went in to see this guy whose official title was Director of Computer Security. 
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Nelson: And as we talked his countering remarks and his little sneer made it increasingly clear that the... 
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Nelson: that the main message was, thou shalt not have another computer at the University of Illinois in Chicago, because essentially the computer belonged to that priesthood. 
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Nelson: Now to give them a certain amount of credit, they could not imagine that anyone besides their trained captive market would be willing to use the computer, would have any use for the computer, because of course they knew computer users as these highly disciplined troops that would come in with their problems neatly punched onto cards, and would obey all the rules and wait at the window until their printout came back. 
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Nelson: And they couldn't imagine any other style of usage, such as a person being able to sit down at his own computer, his or her own computer and wham away at the keys and make pictures. 
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Nelson: But, so, essentially there was a psychological gap. 
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Nelson: And then, of course, when the teeny computers came out it became like, well, it was as though all the galley slaves were suddenly able to jump overboard in life preservers with their own little computers, because they no longer were enslaved to the Computer Center and its it bureaucratic mentality.
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Interviewer: IN THE LATE '60S, A LOT OF ACTIVISTS WERE DISTRUSTFUL OF THE COMPUTER BECAUSE IT WAS THE TOOLS OF THE ESTABLISHMENT. 
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Interviewer: BUT YOU SAW IT AS A LIBERATING DEVICE. 
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Interviewer: WHY?
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Nelson: I saw the computer as a liberating device for essentially the same reason that millions of people now see it as a liberating device. 
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Nelson: Because as soon as you have your own it becomes your printer, your storage plex, your way of examining information and of dealing with ideas to unfold them, to visualize them on the screen, to try out simulations, to explore the world. 
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Nelson: And all of these mechanisms are essentially tools of freedom. 
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Nelson: And as I've said in my book, "Computer Lib" in 1974, "the purpose of computers is human freedom." But when the computers were in the hands of the bureaucracies, the distrust that most people had for computers was quite natural because they distrusted bureaucracies and they supposed the computer to be only the tool of the big organization because that's what they were. 
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Nelson: And it took just a little looking behind the veil to see what it could become. 
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Nelson: But I think in retrospect it's obvious. 
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Nelson: The only difference is when it's not obvious to everyone else, you have a difficult row to hoe. 
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Nelson: If paranoia is believing what no one else believes then there are two cures for paranoia. 
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Nelson: The first is to give in and accept the majority opinion, and the other is to persuade everyone else. 
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Nelson: So it's for my own mental health that I go around the world trying to persuade people of my ideas.
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Interviewer: WHERE DID YOU FIRST HEAR ABOUT THE MICROPROCESSOR AND WHAT DID YOU THINK OF IT WHEN YOU FIRST HEARD ABOUT IT?
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Nelson: Well, I think I first heard of the microprocessor basically in my first computer course in 1960. 
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Nelson: They didn't have them then, but it was obvious that they were coming, and so that my agenda immediately became to program for the personal computers, and to create interactive software for personal computers. 
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Nelson: I didn't know how long it would take. 
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Nelson: I thought it would take two or three years at most. 
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Nelson: So the fact that it took until 1974 before the first personal computer was announced was infuriating -- the first personal computer besides the LINC -- was infuriating to me. 
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Nelson: After all, the... 
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Nelson: it was perfectly obvious that they were going to come down in price and go up in speed, and so there was no point in fiddling about doing anything else. 
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Nelson: The only agenda was to build the tools we needed for creative work. 
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Nelson: And the painful part for me has been that it took so much longer than I thought. 
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Nelson: You know, I was... 
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Nelson: I was going... 
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Nelson: I was expecting to be 25 before I had all the tools that I now have at 52.
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Interviewer: TIME-SHARING IN THE LATE '60S OR EARLY '70S, TIME-SHARING WAS THE FUTURE. 
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Interviewer: WE HAVE THIS VERY VALUABLE RESOURCE. 
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Interviewer: WELL, WE SEE THAT THERE'S MORE PEOPLE OUT THERE THAT MIGHT WANT TO USE IT, SO WE'LL CARVE YOU LITTLE TIME CHUNKS AND LET YOU PAY FOR IT. 
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Interviewer: HOW WAS THAT LIMITING?
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Nelson: Well, the time-sharing notion, of course, is that we have only one big computer and we can let you use a little of it for a moment and then computer will respond. 
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Nelson: And if you're used to punch cards why that seems wonderful and fast. 
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Nelson: But if you expect to have your own computer on your desk it seems completely pointless. 
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Nelson: It comes from the psychology that there's only going to be this one instrument. 
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Nelson: It's like having a bus. 
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Nelson: You're... 
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Nelson: you're willing to take a bus if you don't have a car, but of course, anyone, most people who have the choice of driving a car, whether this is ecologically beneficial or not, choose to drive the car, because they have individual choices that they would not have, otherwise have. 
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Nelson: And it's the same way with personal computers. 
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Nelson: The excuse for time-sharing was that was that you had a central resource that was superior to a distributed resource. 
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Nelson: And we now know that a lot of little computers do a lot more for you.
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Interviewer: WHY DID YOU THINK THAT PEOPLE WOULD WANT PERSONAL COMPUTERS WHEN THE IBMS, THE DECS AND THE INTELS SAID, THERE'S NO MARKET FOR THEM?
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Nelson: It was obvious that everyone... 
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Nelson: would want personal...
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Nelson: It was obvious that everyone would want personal computers because if you just looked at the... 
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Nelson: at the programs people were tinkering with everywhere. 
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Nelson: If you looked at what they were doing at MIT and Stanford and CalTech and Berkeley and Utah and all these wonderful programs for graphics, wonderful programs for text handling... 
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Nelson: well, Ivan Sutherland's Sketchpad in 1960 was a program that allowed you to design on screens. 
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Nelson: And this was miraculous. 
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Nelson: And the principle product of my company... 
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Nelson: Autodesk is now AutoCAD, which is the successor to Sketchpad, that allows... 
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Nelson: that is replacing architectural... 
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Nelson: blueprints throughout the world. 
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Nelson: And this is one of the many things you could do if you had computers. 
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Nelson: Be... 
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Nelson: you could do things with sound. 
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Nelson: Well, now sound studios are built around computers. 
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Nelson: Motion picture synthesis is being built around computers. 
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Nelson: So that all these different things you could do were just lying there waiting for us. 
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Nelson: And this seemed to be perfectly obvious, and the only question was why it was taking so long. 
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Nelson: Orson Welles once said a movie studio is the greatest toy any kid ever had." And now we could enlarge that to say, "the computer is the greatest toy any kid ever had," because now the computer is, among other things, a movie studio.
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Interviewer: HOW IMPORTANT WAS THE ALTAIR, AND THEN THE SUBSEQUENT DEVELOPMENT OF THE HARDWARE HACKERS AT HOMEBREW?
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Nelson: Well the history, anyone could see how it was going to go, but who did it, who happened to do it was a matter of historical accident. 
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Nelson: The first personal computer was really the LINC which was handed out to about 50 scientist laboratories in 1960, but nothing happened from that really except the 8-bit machines from places like digital Equipment which were still expensive but no one had a computer personally. 
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Nelson: Then in 1970 I believe a Vietnamese fellow in Paris announced the first personal computer, I don't remember his name but he goes down in history for having done that. 
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Nelson: But it was the Altair in 1974, the announcement I guess in December 1974 of a personal computer kit for $400. 
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Nelson: And I'd been saying all along that there was a tremendous latent lust for computers out there in the body politic and people thought I was nuts, but I was just speaking from my gut, I knew I wanted these things for many different purposes and as soon as people could see what they could do with them, well it would be like a combination workbench and playpen and recording studio and manuscript coffer and art box and all these wonderful things. 
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Nelson: So...of course everyone would want computers plus the fascinations they have that have no analogy to any other such as programming languages and experimentation all the delights of artificial intelligence and the many different things you can do as a programmer which many people find thrilling. 
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Nelson: And because here you are wrestling with pure ideas as it were, trying to formulate the exact plan that will make the machine do your bidding and this is not a trivial pursuit, this is a real and fascinating activity. 
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Nelson: And so it was perfectly obvious that this would appeal in different ways to millions of people. 
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Nelson: And the puzzlement to me was always that it took so long. 
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Nelson: Anyway so the Altair came out in '74 and bang I believe the first weekend the company was on the verge of bank—bankruptcy and the first weekend they received enough orders in the mail to pull them out of bankruptcy and had not actually built a computer yet, they had just planned the kit and they were rather surprised when not only did they get all these orders in the mail but one guy arrived in his camper, handed over the money and insisted on building the computer in his camper in the Altair parking lot. 
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Nelson: So that allegedly that was the first Altair actually built. 
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Nelson: Anyway the impact this had in terms of busting the dam of suddenly unleashing the computer hunger that was latent...is quite astonishing. 
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Nelson: People drove all night to get their computer kits. 
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Nelson: And so it was the American dream all over again... 
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Nelson: Why do people read the Popular Mechanics magazines? Because they dream of all the things they could do "if," and suddenly here was a new "if." If only I had this computer I could keep track of everything, I could learn everything, I could be creative in every possible way. 
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Nelson: And and so it began. 
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Nelson: And it turned out that the Altair was a flaky and intolerable machine and it has gone away as well as the so-called S-100 standard which it pioneered, but it paved the way for Apple and the other -- Apple who claimed for a time that they invented the personal computer -- it paved the way for Apple and other manufacturers to bring out more robust machines that would actually take over the desktop.
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Interviewer: HOW WOULD YOU DESCRIBE, COMING AT THIS A SLIGHTLY DIFFERENT WAY, HOW WOULD YOU DESCRIBE THE SCENE OF THE HARDWARE COMMUNITY THAT COALESCED INTO THE HOMEBREW OR COALESCED INTO THE TRENTON HOBBYIST ORGANIZATION OR WHEREVER IT ENDED UP IN SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA? HOW WOULD YOU DESCRIBE THAT PRE-ALTAIR?
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Nelson: Before the Altair there were all these technical wizards that had been working on the space program, had been working on you know, different kinds of electronics projects for industry like Lee Felsenstein who was I think at Ampex and many other highly competent electronics engineers who hungered for something more personal, more interesting and some way they might make a lot of money. 
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Nelson: And then bango when suddenly the processor chips were available, well they wanted to make these into personal computers and there immediately were formed in the Bay area... 
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Nelson: Homebrew Computer Club and in Boston, the Boston Area Computer Society and the Trenton Club, and these were essentially leading edge organizations. 
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Nelson: But of course the different individuals in them behaved very differently and no one could have predicted that a fellow named Wozniak would throw together a few chips. 
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Nelson: He now says it was just to please the guys at the club and so he put together the Apple computer. 
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Nelson: And it took that great it took, it took Steve Jobs to say, oh we might sell a few of these. 
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Nelson: At least that's the story, I'm not sure what actually happened. 
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Nelson: But in any case, these groups of technical wizards essentially were reaching toward the possibility of a personal computer industry although most of them didn't get it because they were hobbyists at heart, but a few, a few had the, not just the technical smarts, but the marketing smarts and the sense of what the public would want, which was a very difficult combination to get together.
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Nelson: LET'S GO BACK FOR A SECOND. 
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Nelson: WHAT WAS THE GOAL OF "COMPUTER LIB," WHAT WERE YOU TRYING TO DO THERE?
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Nelson: Well my book, Computer Lib was essentially an act of a desperate man. 
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Nelson: I had been since 1965 trying to pro...to promote the ideas I had for personal computer use which do not exist yet mind you, I mean people "Oh, Nelson isn't it great all your ideas have come about?" In a pig's eye! What's come about has been a nightmarish version, a twisted and deformed version of the world I wanted to see and the fundamental piece of software that I think is necessary hasn't appeared yet which I call...transclusive fragment sorting. 
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Nelson: But so that basically you see a word processor allows you simply to work on one version of one document at a time, and that's not how a serious writer works. 
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Nelson: A serious writer is working on many projects at a given time with many fragments that he might use there, he might use there, he might use there, and you want to be able to try it in all the different places. 
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Nelson: And then when you decide yes it goes here, cancel the others. 
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Nelson: So you need a thread between those separate uses and this software does not exist yet. 
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Nelson: And this was the heart of the Xanadu program which I've been working on for the last 30 years and which is about to come out. 
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Nelson: In any case computer ignorance is one of the most dangerous conditions -- well you don't see it very much anymore, frankly. 
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Nelson: When I wrote that in 1974 -- I forgot the original question...
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Interviewer: WHAT WAS YOUR GOAL OF WRITING "COMPUTER LIB" IN 1974, WHAT WERE YOU TRYING TO DO THEN?
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Nelson: Okay. 
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Nelson: "Computer Lib" was an act -- "Computer Lib" was really an act of desperation because I had not been able to get my ideas out to the computer community and I thought I would reach a broader public with "Computer Lib," I thought it would become a bestseller out among non-computer people which is very interesting because it didn't, it caught on among the computer youth at the universities and in many companies. 
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Nelson: But it was an act of desperation because I wanted these ideas to get out, people say now, they say, "Look Nelson your vision's come about." And I say, "No, a thousand times no, what's out there is a nightmarish deformation of the way it should be." And what I was really trying to promote was a much better world and I was also trying to survive... 
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Nelson: I found it very difficult to find employment in the '50s and '60s -- in the '60s and '70s -- because no one wanted a computer visionary, especially one whose language they could not understand. 
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Nelson: They thought I was crazy, they could not imagine sitting at the computer screen, they could not...they could not imagine, I was talking about image synthesis for example, which I was also working on. 
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Nelson: And I said...the computer will be able to make objects that look like real photographs. 
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Nelson: And they said, "What do you mean look like real photographs?" So I said, well, you know, "What do you mean, what do I mean look like real photoss...it'll look like a real photograph of something that..." and they couldn't understand the concept, okay. 
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Nelson: So, so I put all these different ideas into, between covers about what computers were now doing and what they could become and it was called "Computer Lib." And it was very moving the moment I thought of the title, it was the night my grandmother had just died who raised me, and I'd thought -- sitting in a restaurant trying to distract myself with thoughts of this book I was going to write, and suddenly it came to me, "Computer Lib," and I just cried and cried because it unleashed all the feelings I had. 
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Nelson: And it was interesting too because I just talked to Russ Walter who publishes a book called, "The Secret Guide to Computing," and he thought of the title Computer Lib, I don't know when, but he was so delighted with this title and the next day he was in the computer store and saw my book by that title. 
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Nelson: Anyway, so "Computer Lib" was intended to gel computerdom as I saw it, not as the stolid professionals saw it or the corporations saw it, but as this great seething potential of excitement and hobbies and new tools around the computer screen which was clearly going to be humanity's new home. 
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Nelson: And so it froze a moment, it essentially turned the corner for a lot of people in terms of making this whole vision plain at once which is why it took me so much longer to write than I...expected. 
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Nelson: It was only 128 pages but they were very big pages... 
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Nelson: And so anyway this book essentially did not reach the people, the general public I wanted to reach but it did get the message to a whole generation of hackers and engineers who then...have since become the head of the head of the new industry. 
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Nelson: And that's, I like to think that I've helped to shape the way people thought but not enough.
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Interviewer: DID YOU GO TO ATLANTIC CITY DOWN TO THE CONVENTION, TO PC '76?
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Nelson: Hm hm.
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Interviewer: WHAT WAS THAT LIKE?
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Nelson: The first PC convention at...Atlantic City. 
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Nelson: Well it was extraordinary. 
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Nelson: I and my friends, we had a company called the itty bitty machine company in Chicago, it was the first, maybe the second computer store in Chicago, but we were, we were out for bear, we were going to franchise it and make it big. 
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Nelson: And and the name really worked for us because of course itty bitty machine company had always been a nickname for IBM and the great laugh was that we were selling these tiny computers and people would call up IBM and say I hear there's a new, there are new computers out for under $1000 and people at IBM would actually say, Oh call up the itty bitty machine company in Evanston. 
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Nelson: So anyway I and my colleagues drove all night to get to this thing and then hit rush hour traffic and people, I was driving and I was really determined to get there. 
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Nelson: People who were in the car claimed that I actually drove on the sides of tunnels to get through traffic, but we made it. 
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Nelson: And it was it was quite a zoo, it was very it was crowded and busy and we were selling my book "Computer Lib" and we had banners and we had our franchise package and we were selling EMSI computers. 
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Nelson: And I gave a talk which was attended by I guess a couple of about a dozen perhaps diehards who had read "Computer Lib" already and they didn't like the fact that I went over time and they actually opened the curtains, the folding doors to the cocktail party so I could...hardly be heard and yet my diehard listeners hung on listening. 
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Nelson: It was, it was quite a zoo. 
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Nelson: I remember Jobs and Woz were there with the, with the Apple I or perhaps it was the first Apple II and people kept telling me I should go look at the Apple computer and I would ask does it have lower case? They said no. 
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Nelson: I said well it can't mean anything cause it doesn't have lower case because after all text is going to be the center of the next generation of computer use. 
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Nelson: So I was wrong and I was right. 
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Nelson: I was I was wrong about Apple not being a success, I was right that they finally had to put in lower case.
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Interviewer: WHAT WAS THE SENSE WHEN YOU CAME TO A PLACE LIKE THAT WHICH WAS I GUESS THE FIRST REAL GROUPING OF DIFFERENT COMPUTER COMPANIES? ALTAIR HAD HAD THEIR OWN CONVENTIONS, BUT WERE YOU SURPRISED THAT THERE WERE THAT MANY PEOPLE ENTHUSED?
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Nelson: Was I surprised at the size of the gathering? Hardly, I mean I was surprised it wasn't a million people. 
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Nelson: To me this thing has always moved much more slowly than I expected it to. 
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Nelson: I really expected the personal computer to be on every desk by 19...by 1962 or '63 in 1960. 
00:23:51.364 --> 00:23:57.002
Nelson: In fact in 1960 I expected the computer to supersede paper publishing by 1962. 
00:23:57.002 --> 00:24:16.057
Nelson: In other words I had a clear view of what was going to happen but I mistook that for a short distance and things have taking, have taken much longer to happen and happened so much worse in many ways and...people have been so confused and not understood the direction.
00:24:16.057 --> 00:24:34.017
Interviewer: BUT HOW DID YOU FEEL—YOU'VE BEEN SAYING THESE THINGS SINCE, THAT YOU'VE BEEN THINKING OF SINCE '60, PROBABLY HAD SOME THINGS WRITTEN DOWN LIKE IN MID '60S, LATE '60S, "COMPUTER LIB" COMES OUT AND SUDDENLY THE HARDWARE ACTION IS BEING HAPPENING AND WE'VE GOT CONVENTIONS, TALK ABOUT HOW DID THAT MAKE YOU FEEL?
00:24:34.017 --> 00:24:35.172
Nelson: Less ticked off. 
00:24:35.172 --> 00:24:45.777
Nelson: I was very angry by this time because I had been not only, not I'd not only been unable to make a living but I'd been ridiculed and gotten rather snotty... 
00:24:45.777 --> 00:24:54.343
Nelson: treatment from a lot of well people like venture capitalists, how was I to know what venture capitalists were like, you know. 
00:24:54.343 --> 00:25:20.244
Nelson: And so the...there was a great accumulated bitterness that I had by this time which has taken well I would say 15 years to wear off since the personal computer started and now since actually getting a salary that's made a very great difference in my outlook because it's very tough to keep going on for years and years sure that you're right with other people thinking you're nuts.
00:25:20.244 --> 00:25:24.757
Interviewer: WHAT WAS THE WEST COAST COMPUTER FAIR LIKE?
00:25:24.757 --> 00:25:28.489
Nelson: The first West Coast Computer Fair, let's see. 
00:25:28.489 --> 00:25:31.825
Nelson: I gave a luncheon address I think it was. 
00:25:31.825 --> 00:25:35.797
Nelson: My title was, Those Unforgettable Next Two Years. 
00:25:35.797 --> 00:25:47.949
Nelson: And I think I laid it out...basically what was going to happen in the next two years in terms of in term of the explosion of the desktop computer world. 
00:25:47.949 --> 00:25:58.512
Nelson: I did predict the collapse of IBM and that has taken longer so it's now, it's just happening now but it was very clearly inevitable. 
00:25:58.512 --> 00:26:15.588
Nelson: Once again, I got the timing wrong but given that the personal and small scale computers were coming along at that rate the domination of the field by a huge company that relied on mainframes had to come to an end. 
00:26:15.588 --> 00:26:34.571
Nelson: So at any rate the, well the West Coast Computer Fair was very interesting also in that it was a gathering of innovators who could still get launched on a very small amount of capital, that window has closed further than I expected it to. 
00:26:34.571 --> 00:26:47.596
Nelson: And and now you see a really good and new idea can still get a start or so it seems, but of course there may be very many good and real new ideas that we don't see.
00:26:47.596 --> 00:26:55.061
Interviewer: WE ACTUALLY LOOKED FOR TAPES OF YOUR ADDRESS 'CAUSE I'VE HEARD REFERENCES TO IT, I'M REAL ANXIOUS TO SEE IT. 
00:26:55.061 --> 00:26:57.938
Interviewer: I HEAR THAT YOU HAVE THE TRANSCRIPT OF IT?
00:26:57.938 --> 00:26:59.449
Nelson: I have it in print and I'll give it to you.
00:26:59.449 --> 00:27:03.176
Interviewer: DO HAVE IT HANDY?
00:27:03.176 --> 00:27:05.625
Nelson: Yeah.
00:27:16.249 --> 00:27:20.251
Nelson: Well yeah here's the talk I gave at the first West Coast Computer Fair. 
00:27:20.251 --> 00:27:26.199
Nelson: This is a little book I put out in the '77 called "The Home Computer Revolution," it dropped like a stone. 
00:27:26.199 --> 00:27:30.368
Nelson: [READING FROM MANUSCRIPT] The title is Those Unforgettable Next Two Years. 
00:27:30.368 --> 00:27:36.316
Nelson: "Here we are at the brink of a new world, small computers are about to remake our society and you know it. 
00:27:36.316 --> 00:27:46.322
Nelson: I'm supposed to tell you what is about to happen in the, in the near future, but to understand the future we must understand the past, most people don't realize what has happened. 
00:27:46.322 --> 00:28:09.724
Nelson: What is astonishing to me is not so much the future as the past and the things that are going to happen that are going to surprise the sudden appearance of little helpful interactive computers everywhere should be less surprising than the past circumstances that have delayed all this till now." [ENDS READING] So that's take, my take is why the heck did it take so long rather than isn't it miraculous that it happened. 
00:28:09.724 --> 00:28:11.336
Nelson: And I was saying that in '77.
00:28:11.336 --> 00:28:47.272
Interviewer: WHAT, HOW DID, WE'RE DANCING AROUND THIS, YOU'VE ANSWERED THIS A SLIGHTLY DIFFERENT WAY BUT LET ME KIND OF A DIFFERENT TANGENT HERE — HOW DID THE DEVELOPMENT OR HOW HAS THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE PERSONAL COMPUTER CHANGED, WE'LL DO IT IN LITTLE PIECES, ONE THE FIELD OF COMPUTING AND TWO SOCIETY? LET'S DO THE FIELD OF COMPUTING FIRST.
00:28:47.272 --> 00:29:03.829
Nelson: How have little computers changed computing and how have they changed society? See I...where my mind is wrapping around that and thinking well it's hard to define change because if it was going to do that, you know, is it really a change if it's inevitable. 
00:29:03.829 --> 00:29:04.470
Nelson: But okay. 
00:29:04.470 --> 00:29:18.652
Nelson: First of all the computing field has changed enormously because it has put computer power on the desktop and the computer field is not now what it was because the computer field used to be that big and now it's that big. 
00:29:18.652 --> 00:29:28.791
Nelson: When when I joined the Association for Computing Machinery in '65, I suppose it was a few thousand members or so, and now it's hundreds of thousands I think. 
00:29:28.791 --> 00:29:46.438
Nelson: And but the number of people, the number of Americans with computers on their desks who buy software is in the millions, and so if you refer to "the computer field," it really has to include all those million of people now and that's a, that in itself is an enormous change. 
00:29:46.438 --> 00:29:55.743
Nelson: The kinds of problems researchers work on are different because of course new ideas have come up, no one had heard of chaos or fractals in 1965. 
00:29:55.743 --> 00:30:11.272
Nelson: But also the emphasis on interaction is completely new and that's the notion that you're creating interactive systems which will respond to what the person does at the screen and that's completely different from the old concept of computing. 
00:30:11.272 --> 00:30:26.609
Nelson: Now I happen to have gotten into this very early because I was a filmmaker and to me screens and what happens on screens and the psychology of what happens on screens was completely natural and instantly transposed to the computer screen. 
00:30:26.609 --> 00:30:35.143
Nelson: But now instead of being a motion picture over time that just goes on happening, it was going to be one which the user could effect. 
00:30:35.143 --> 00:30:42.716
Nelson: And it's astonishing me, it's astonished me all these years to see how difficult...it was for people to imagine this. 
00:30:42.716 --> 00:30:49.838
Nelson: The idea that you are creating some sort of an entity which will respond and could respond any way whatsoever. 
00:30:49.838 --> 00:31:17.881
Nelson: So the problem is not just making it responsive...it's to make it respond in a coherent, meaningful fashion that will integrate some domain you're working on, whether it's text or numbers or pictures and allow you to work on this for hours without losing track of what you're doing so a system like well I've just been working with a program called MacroMind Director which allows you to make interactive movies on the Macintosh screen. 
00:31:17.881 --> 00:31:23.785
Nelson: And I'll tell you I was really infuriated at my...during my first couple of hours using it. 
00:31:23.785 --> 00:31:31.870
Nelson: But then I settled down and said oh I suppose I get it, they mean, they're thinking of it this way and I can tolerate it now. 
00:31:31.870 --> 00:31:33.410
Nelson: But that's one example. 
00:31:33.410 --> 00:31:48.105
Nelson: This language for producing interactive systems is one example of an interactive system which have designed for a specific purpose that doesn't quite interact the way I want it to you see, that's the, that's always the conflict. 
00:31:48.105 --> 00:32:00.747
Nelson: You sit down at a, at a screen system and you want it to be intelligible and clear and simple and it gets off on tangents and complications that you feel don't belong and you can't reconfigure it. 
00:32:00.747 --> 00:32:06.587
Nelson: So that's where we are now in a world of irreconfigurable software that no one can change. 
00:32:06.587 --> 00:32:15.185
Nelson: And I hope that changes so we come to a world of software that you can quickly reshape into the environment you would like to work in.
00:32:15.185 --> 00:32:21.773
Interviewer: LATE SIXTIES A LOT OF PEOPLE LOOKED AT IT AS THE TOOL OF THE ESTABLISHMENT, OF MILITARY. 
00:32:21.773 --> 00:32:26.362
Interviewer: HOW HAS THAT CHANGED, HOW'S THE IMAGE OF THE COMPUTER CHANGED?
00:32:26.362 --> 00:32:44.949
Nelson: Well sure people thought computers were a tool of the establishment and the military because they were, but...the public has a simple minded idea of how much control the establishment and the military exert on their machines anyway. 
00:32:44.949 --> 00:33:25.317
Nelson: For example, my favorite example is that billions of dollars went for "defense computer research" in the 1960s and '70s, but lots of that actually dribbled off into people playing with artificial intelligence and computer graphics and so what looked to the public on the, on the spreadsheet, on the national budget like an...a great expenditure for defense was really ended up in the laps of long hairs who were playing these games like Space War in their in their allegedly high security military places. 
00:33:25.317 --> 00:33:37.443
Nelson: I worked in a, in a, on a military project for awhile...one of the Nike missiles, it would never have worked, and we spent a lot of time playing games. 
00:33:37.443 --> 00:33:54.435
Nelson: Anyway, so the public stereotype...has a great deal of merit, that the computers were in the hands of the government but at the same time not, they were not the simple tool of oppression people imagine even then. 
00:33:54.435 --> 00:34:00.977
Nelson: And now of course it's as though the government is in the hands of the computers. 
00:34:00.977 --> 00:34:07.598
Nelson: In other words, the computer freaks are in control much more than anyone imagines. 
00:34:07.598 --> 00:34:31.451
Nelson: My favorite example is the guy who I think he was a lieutenant but the way I heard this story he managed the system on the Pentagon that reported on military preparedness and when he was in a bad mood he would make a million soldiers invisible to his superiors just because he was, he felt like it. 
00:34:31.451 --> 00:34:53.948
Nelson: So anyway obviously now we see that computers are a tool, as Martin Luther said, "Why should the devil have all the best tunes?" And we see that a tool — that the computer as a tool is accessible as well to every cause no matter how liberal or radical or counter-cultural or small. 
00:34:53.948 --> 00:35:11.101
Nelson: So Greenpeace and the ecological movements now have their computer networks, and the anti-smoking movement has its own computer network, and you know, let a hundred flowers bloom is now the general use of computers.
00:35:13.032 --> 00:35:28.719
Nelson: In 1960 the computer world was at a turning point because already the infiltration had begun of small computers, and small graphical computers -- especially the PDP-1 and the PDP-4 -- were already out there in engineering laboratories. 
00:35:28.719 --> 00:35:30.779
Nelson: Now that's where my heart was. 
00:35:30.779 --> 00:35:38.424
Nelson: I was, I was reading the catalogs avidly and saying oh boy, any minute now these things are going to get all over. 
00:35:38.424 --> 00:35:45.071
Nelson: And that's when IBM made a move which I think, I still think set civilization back about ten years. 
00:35:45.071 --> 00:35:47.730
Nelson: And that was their 360 computer system. 
00:35:47.730 --> 00:35:50.056
Nelson: It was a brilliant marketing move. 
00:35:50.056 --> 00:36:02.952
Nelson: They billed it as one computer for all purposes, so it was going to do business computing, so-called scientific computing, well those were essentially the two fields that they were going after. 
00:36:02.952 --> 00:36:27.413
Nelson: Now what this really was was a move to head off the other computer companies from establishing a niche within corporate America by bamboozling corporations into thinking that one computer would be used for the job could be used for all types of jobs, why that made the corporate comptroller think well that's the sensible thing to do, why have more than one computer. 
00:36:27.413 --> 00:36:38.514
Nelson: Now of course the joke is that the one IBM 360 cost as much as four or five or six computers would have cost but that's not what showed up on the alleged bottom line. 
00:36:38.514 --> 00:37:16.204
Nelson: And so this brought about the incredible horrific system of oppression which kept computing in its iron grip for the next decade, specifically the Computer Centers which were the captive tools of IBM where not only did you have to use the computer according to the system that had been laid out and submit punch cards, but also you had to do it according to the rules laid down by the bureaucracy that ran it who were all trained by and extremely loyal to IBM even though they worked for your corporation allegedly and because well that's just how these things work. 
00:37:16.204 --> 00:37:30.229
Nelson: So the 360 diabolically I would say suppressed personal uses of computing by about a decade because otherwise I think the small computers would have marched in everywhere a decade sooner in '64 rather than '74. 
00:37:30.229 --> 00:37:53.295
Nelson: And so the fact that it was...That it was all on a chip and that sort of thing is relatively minor because as soon as a small computer appeared in a department then some kid would start programming it and this kid would think of more and more things to do with it and he or she would gradually get to know it and make, and make other suggestions. 
00:37:53.295 --> 00:38:06.456
Nelson: And so you would have had a...dispersed and diffuse innovation throughout corporate America as distinct from the extremely oppressive and centralized computing system that evolved during that time. 
00:38:06.456 --> 00:38:07.387
Nelson: So...And I... 
00:38:07.387 --> 00:38:33.511
Nelson: I came up against this system on several different occasions when I suddenly realized that it wasn't just a machine or an organizational structure but it was a, as it were, a rather large conspiracy to prevent, as IBM saw it, personal as IBM saw it, competitors from getting a nose into the corporation or as I saw it, preventing the innovative uses of the computers that were ripe to happen. 
00:38:33.511 --> 00:38:46.871
Nelson: And that is the reason the personal computing explosion occurred with the violence that it occurred in 1974 because if it had been a trickle starting in '64, it would have been much more evolutionary. 
00:38:46.871 --> 00:38:57.175
Nelson: and what happened was all this pent up demand, a sort of latent understanding everybody had of what computers could do suddenly was allowed to burst forth.
00:38:57.175 --> 00:39:04.543
Interviewer: IN THE LATE, IN THE MID-'70S...YOU KNOW BIG CORPORATIONS I THINK, I KNOW DEC FOR ONE, DAVID... 
00:39:04.543 --> 00:39:09.351
Interviewer: PITCHED THEM TO DO A PERSONAL COMPUTER AND IBM HAS CERTAINLY —
00:39:09.351 --> 00:39:10.652
Nelson: Did David, have you talked to him?
00:39:10.652 --> 00:39:11.596
Interviewer: NO, WE HAVEN'T.
00:39:11.596 --> 00:39:12.373
Nelson: Huh.
00:39:12.373 --> 00:39:19.789
Interviewer: BUT, LET ME FINISH UP WITH THIS, WHY WERE THEY, WHY DID THEY REJECT IT, SIMPLY BECAUSE THERE WAS NO MARKET OR BECAUSE IT WAS A THREAT?
00:39:19.789 --> 00:39:20.661
Nelson: Why did whom reject it?
00:39:20.661 --> 00:39:26.677
Interviewer: DEC, IBM, WHY DID THEY ALL SAY THERE'S NO MARKET? WAS IT BECAUSE YOU KNOW IT'S A THREAT?
00:39:26.677 --> 00:39:39.281
Nelson: ...No, IBM said there was no market for a personal computer because even if they had imagined that there was, and I'm sure that sincerely they didn't imagine it, nevertheless it was nowhere near their price horizon. 
00:39:39.281 --> 00:39:51.068
Nelson: And DEC didn't see it simply because they didn't get it because the establishment never gets it, that's how it is with paradigm shift, the establishment does not see where the next wave is coming from. 
00:39:51.068 --> 00:40:00.522
Nelson: And even if they hire somebody to tell them where the next wave is coming from, they never believe them which is exactly what happened with Xerox and Xerox PARC. 
00:40:00.522 --> 00:40:16.044
Nelson: When Xerox set up Xerox Palo Alto Research Center to tell them where the next wave was going to come from, and they basically gave them the Macintosh back, they said, "No, tell us where the next paper wave is coming from." So of course they couldn't miss the point. 
00:40:16.044 --> 00:40:19.954
Nelson: So the establishment can almost never understand where the next... 
00:40:19.954 --> 00:40:25.380
Nelson: innovation is coming from because they are, they become entrenched to an old way of thinking.
00:40:25.380 --> 00:40:46.188
Interviewer: TAKE ME THROUGH THE HISTORY OF THE, THIS IS FOR THE NEXT PROGRAM, TAKE ME THROUGH THE HISTORY THROUGH THE INTERFACE, YOU KNOW, IVAN SUTHERLAND'S SKETCHPAD, YOU KNOW, THAT WHOLE LINE, AND WHERE ARE WE NOW, WHERE HAVE WE BEEN, WHERE ARE WE GOING?
00:40:46.188 --> 00:40:47.486
Nelson: I don't like the... 
00:40:47.486 --> 00:40:59.811
Nelson: I don't like the term interface because that suggests that you have a package, a bunch of functions in the machine and then some way the user's going to select from this bunch of functions. 
00:40:59.811 --> 00:41:02.471
Nelson: And that's already too late in the game. 
00:41:02.471 --> 00:41:16.353
Nelson: What I talk about is virtuality, which is essentially the imaginary structure, the seeming of the system and creating this imaginary structure of all the things the computer could do and how to interact with them. 
00:41:16.353 --> 00:41:19.077
Nelson: That's the design of interactive systems. 
00:41:19.077 --> 00:41:38.992
Nelson: Now, we were off to a fabulous start in 1960 with Ivan Sutherland's Sketchpad, one of the most extraordinary programs ever written where he invented object-oriented programming, he invented rubber band line and various kinds of light pen tracking, he invented instances, he invented blueprints on a screen. 
00:41:38.992 --> 00:41:45.933
Nelson: All of these things in one package and the amazing thing to me is that this did not start a vast movement. 
00:41:45.933 --> 00:42:05.394
Nelson: In fact, it just stood there as an example that people would gaze, they'd look at the movie and say, "Yeah, gee, well that's very inspirational," and they'd go back and do exactly what they were doing which had nothing to do with interactive computing because there wasn't any interactive computing. 
00:42:05.394 --> 00:42:08.638
Nelson: To me interactive computing is an art form, is... 
00:42:08.638 --> 00:42:14.606
Nelson: basically a branch of movie making and the computer establishment does not understand this. 
00:42:14.606 --> 00:42:28.942
Nelson: People who are trained as programmers think that they are perforce competent to design interactive systems whereas they have no more competence to design interactive...systems than if they'd been trained in pipe fitting. 
00:42:28.942 --> 00:42:30.563
Nelson: [INTERRUPTION] [TAPE CUT]
00:42:34.889 --> 00:42:36.617
Interviewer: LET ME JUMP IN HERE FOR A SECOND. 
00:42:36.617 --> 00:42:38.141
Interviewer: TELL ME ABOUT DOUG ENGELBART. 
00:42:38.141 --> 00:42:39.310
Interviewer: WERE YOU AT THE '67...?
00:42:39.311 --> 00:42:41.711
Nelson: Yeah, but can I go on with that roll?
00:42:41.711 --> 00:42:42.224
Interviewer: SURE.
00:42:42.224 --> 00:42:43.432
Nelson: We'll get to him. 
00:42:43.432 --> 00:42:44.237
Nelson: Okay, good. 
00:42:44.237 --> 00:42:51.218
Nelson: The people that are best trained I think for the design of interactive systems are really movie makers. 
00:42:51.218 --> 00:42:57.662
Nelson: Now I saw that because I think of myself as a movie maker even though I've only made one movie. 
00:42:57.662 --> 00:43:04.038
Nelson: And because you are visualizing what will happen on a screen if the user does specific things. 
00:43:04.038 --> 00:43:19.074
Nelson: Again I use the term screen generically, it could be a, an audio surround, it could be a miasma hanging in the middle of a room, but you're visualizing something an interaction between some world and what the user is doing. 
00:43:19.074 --> 00:43:36.593
Nelson: And this is a very intricate interaction like making movie because when you make a movie, you may make a decision about the music or the sound which influences the way you're going to cut a certain scene which influences the way the script's going to come out. 
00:43:36.593 --> 00:43:39.345
Nelson: All the parts interact with one another. 
00:43:39.345 --> 00:43:57.669
Nelson: And so in designing the system you have to make all these decisions in concert and in parallel, whereas computer people tend to want to set down rules and make it simpler and clearer, set down guidelines, and that leads to extremely clunky systems of the kinds we see now. 
00:43:57.669 --> 00:44:11.027
Nelson: So the kinds of interactive systems I've been designing have been far more fluid, and far more well...when people see my designs, they say, "Oh my God," because it's not like anything they expected. 
00:44:11.027 --> 00:44:22.505
Nelson: When I was at Datapoint in 1981, they wanted me to design a suite of office software so I came up with a design for a text system that I'd discarded ten years previously. 
00:44:22.505 --> 00:44:27.136
Nelson: And they said, "Oh my God, this is too futuristic" and threw it out. 
00:44:27.136 --> 00:44:33.513
Nelson: At any rate so where this is going, the most influential stuff is going to be the video games. 
00:44:33.513 --> 00:44:56.133
Nelson: In other words I take, I take Pac-Man to be the prototype of the office systems of tomorrow, not these obtuse, tiresome word processors and outline processors and spreadsheets, but Pac-Man which has real interaction, immediate feedback, color and sound, and is self revealing as different aspects of the design become clear to the user. 
00:44:56.133 --> 00:45:02.308
Nelson: As distinct from things where you have to open the manual and tediously learn each feature. 
00:45:02.308 --> 00:45:18.418
Nelson: So when the generation that grew up on video games gets to it, well they are now, they're now beginning to program their own software and so that's why we're seeing more and more vivid and imaginative software out there in the marketplace. 
00:45:18.418 --> 00:45:21.102
Nelson: Okay, you asked me about Doug Engelbart.
00:45:21.103 --> 00:45:25.637
Interviewer: YOU WENT TO '67 CONFERENCE WHEN HE PRESENTED?
00:45:25.637 --> 00:45:25.905
Nelson: No. 
00:45:25.905 --> 00:45:29.249
Nelson: Was it '67, I thought it was 68? ...I'm not sure. 
00:45:29.249 --> 00:45:40.818
Nelson: It's funny, I started designing text systems in the fall of 1960 and basically came up with the hypertext concept, and that word, and various data structure designs for it. 
00:45:40.818 --> 00:45:53.992
Nelson: Over the period 1960 to 1965 I did not hear of Douglas Engelbart until 1965, I remember the conversation, and I didn't meet him 'til I think it was '67 that I came out here and met with his group. 
00:45:53.992 --> 00:46:05.963
Nelson: And so I guess that was when I first held a mouse and said, "Of course, it's great." That was something I hadn't thought of, and it was absolutely much better than the light pen. 
00:46:05.963 --> 00:46:14.055
Nelson: And but we had a fundamental disagreement because Doug's stuff was all sequential, he had, everything was in one long... 
00:46:14.055 --> 00:46:14.657
Nelson: outline. 
00:46:14.657 --> 00:46:22.013
Nelson: And so you were starting sequentially and continuing sequentially with the objective of sequential documents. 
00:46:22.013 --> 00:46:33.582
Nelson: And this seemed to me to miss the point of the computer screen...because writing is really sequential, in my belief, because we have numbered pages and for no other reason. 
00:46:33.582 --> 00:46:59.931
Nelson: An author has to twist his or her brain to make a document fit into a sequential structure and now that we have screens and interaction, we don't need that sequential structure anymore, the writer need only create the, a presentation showing the user what the categories and things to be looked at are, and allow the user to make these jumps into that material -- that's the hypertext concept. 
00:46:59.931 --> 00:47:03.809
Nelson: And but I don't want to sound disrespectful of Engelbart. 
00:47:03.809 --> 00:47:06.953
Nelson: Engelbart is one of the great men of our time. 
00:47:06.953 --> 00:47:23.538
Nelson: Doug Engelbart has not only had a vision of a better world and work at screens for high-powered teams that has been, well that has influenced many people, but he has also had the courage and clarity of mind to go on and on and on against all odds. 
00:47:23.538 --> 00:47:29.957
Nelson: And and he's just done a wonderful job in inspiring the whole world, and what we see out there. 
00:47:29.957 --> 00:47:46.007
Nelson: What did he invent? He invented the mouse, he invented word processing, he invented outline processing, he invented multiple windows on a screen, he invented the text link -- he gives me equal credit for that but I'm not sure I deserve it. 
00:47:46.007 --> 00:47:52.361
Nelson: He is, he is and he is a saintly individual, so I think he is one of the great men of our time.
00:47:52.360 --> 00:48:00.899
Interviewer: JUST IN GENERAL KIND OF TRY TO MAKE AS MUCH EYE CONTACT AS YOU FEEL COMFORTABLE, YOU COME OFF BETTER THAT'S WHY I ASK. 
00:48:00.899 --> 00:48:13.311
Interviewer: WHAT'S SPECIAL ABOUT A COMPUTER, WHY IS IT THAT IT'S ON THE ONE LEVEL SO SEDUCTIVE, PEOPLE WILL WRAP THEMSELVES AROUND A COMPUTER FOR HOURS, HOW IS IT DIFFERENT OTHER TOOLS?
00:48:13.311 --> 00:48:18.012
Nelson: The word computer, let's start, let's start with the word computer. 
00:48:18.012 --> 00:48:57.480
Nelson: It's a misnomer, okay? John Von Neumann called it the all-purpose machine and even though today's computer designs are called Von Neumann machines, nevertheless we don't call them all-purpose machines, we call them computers because historically we just happened to use them first for numbers, they could have been used first for controlling moving signs like baseball scoreboards, in which case we wouldn't have thought of them as numerical, we would have thought of them as textural and graphical machines first and then recognized their numerical functions afterward. 
00:48:57.480 --> 00:49:04.254
Nelson: So it's a historical accident that they're called computers and this has mislead a lot of people. 
00:49:04.254 --> 00:49:26.581
Nelson: What they really are is all-purpose machines that can be turned to any purpose by instructing them, which doesn't mean saying "Now computer, you do this," it means thinking of a series of operations and a way of specifying those operations that will make the events occur that you want to occur, and that sounds so simple. 
00:49:26.581 --> 00:49:36.603
Nelson: And there's the seduction, there's the quagmire of the that pulls everybody in, quick -- what's...what are those puddles called that pull you in?
00:49:36.603 --> 00:49:37.420
Interviewer: QUICKSAND?
00:49:37.420 --> 00:49:38.141
Nelson: Quicksand. 
00:49:38.141 --> 00:49:55.579
Nelson: And the quicksand of the computer is that you think it's going to be easy and you put your toe in, and you think it won't take much longer because all you wanted to do was this little bit and so obvious to you, it's so clear to you what you want this machine to do. 
00:49:55.579 --> 00:50:13.542
Nelson: And you think okay it'll just take a few steps...well it'll take a few steps more, there you are six years later and your workroom piled high with papers and printouts and you're gradually realizing what an enormous job you chose because you just had no idea at the outset. 
00:50:13.542 --> 00:50:19.901
Nelson: And that's how it is essentially with, that's how it's been in almost every branch of computing. 
00:50:19.901 --> 00:50:29.997
Nelson: You thought, we all thought that all these different were so much simpler because the concept came to our mind so readily and the execution took so long. 
00:50:29.997 --> 00:50:45.338
Nelson: This has been especially true in the project I started 30 years ago with my term paper at Harvard which was going to be a writer's console, I thought, which would later expand to a worldwide publishing system and in fact it still is. 
00:50:45.338 --> 00:50:57.925
Nelson: And we'll have the product out this year or next and so after 30 years this extremely intricate system which keeps track of all the different versions of the same fragments will be available. 
00:50:57.925 --> 00:51:08.414
Nelson: And what I thought I could do as a...as one individual for a term paper 30 years ago has taken dozens of very brilliant and well trained guys years to complete.
00:51:08.414 --> 00:51:14.652
Interviewer: ISN'T THAT THE LAYER OF THAT QUICKSAND ALSO A LOOKING GLASS? I MEAN DON'T YOU WHEN YOU DIP YOUR FOOT IN —
00:51:14.652 --> 00:51:17.965
Nelson: Beautifully put, yeah I'll, I'll quote you. 
00:51:17.965 --> 00:51:35.887
Nelson: Yeah, the layer, the upper surface of that quagmire, that quicksand is really a looking glass because...there you are seeing yourself, the computer is a projected system, a Rorschach test, 'cause you look at it and you say why of course. 
00:51:35.887 --> 00:51:50.345
Nelson: What it really is a system for dress design, it's a system for movie making, it's a system for and you name your favorite subject because you see how this can be used for what you want to do. 
00:51:50.345 --> 00:52:13.237
Nelson: And but unlike narcissus just looking into this thing you have to, you have to reach in and try to pull out of that looking glass, you're, you're trying to reach behind for the image you see and what you get is this quicksand that pulls you in and keeps you programming and designing for years and years.
00:52:13.237 --> 00:52:25.208
Interviewer: I MEAN IT ON ANOTHER LEVEL ENTIRELY ...TO STEP INTO VIRTUALITY, INTO A VIRTUAL REALITY THAT ESSENTIALLY BECAUSE YOU CAN DO THINGS YOU CAN'T EVER EVEN IMAGINE DOING ON THIS LEVEL.
00:52:25.208 --> 00:52:38.018
Nelson: The term virtual reality gives me a slight problem, I like to call goggle-roving because basically what you're doing you put on goggles and you're in a three dimensional world and I'm glad it's catching on finally. 
00:52:38.018 --> 00:52:46.478
Nelson: Ivan Sutherland was doing it at Harvard in 1965 and I couldn't understand why it's taken all these years for people to see how great that is. 
00:52:46.478 --> 00:53:13.884
Nelson: On the other hand I'm not a member of that church, I mean it's, it's, it's going to be very interesting, I'm not sure it will reform the world and even if every personal computer owner puts on the goggles and enters a three dimensional space, it doesn't solve the interface problem because you still have to decide what's going to -- how you're going to control the database, and how you're going to control this or that aspect of the virtual world you're in. 
00:53:13.884 --> 00:53:27.826
Nelson: But still the virtual reality roving is a wonderful toy and it's a wonderful way of visualizing and an easy way to get around things, and far better than MS-DOS, and so I heartily applaud all the directions that are taking us into it.
00:53:28.619 --> 00:53:37.504
Interviewer: AS I WAS DESCRIBING TO YOU -- PROGRAM SIX -- WE HAVE, LOOKING AT THESE STATIC NOTIONS, THESE IMAGES, THESE POPULAR IMAGES OF THE COMPUTER WHICH ARE OUTDATED AS SOON AS... 
00:53:37.504 --> 00:53:41.244
Interviewer: ACTUALLY, WHY DON'T YOU PHRASE THAT FOR US IF YOU DON'T MIND DOING THAT.
00:53:46.072 --> 00:53:55.648
Nelson: Our picture of the computer...the public picture of the computer keeps changing and almost the--
00:54:07.063 --> 00:54:07.896
Interviewer: AGAIN, AS DIRECT TO ME AS POSSIBLE.
00:54:07.896 --> 00:54:08.667
Nelson: Okay, yeah. 
00:54:08.667 --> 00:54:29.316
Nelson: The public picture of the computer keeps changing and in a sense is obsolete almost the most it's formulated so that, well I remember the first, the cover of Time magazine, the computer was on the cover of Time magazine about 1947, '49, it was an Artzybasheff cover and it was, it was, showed the computer as an octopus. 
00:54:29.316 --> 00:54:42.503
Nelson: And the bureaucratic octopus image that was on the cover of TIME and perhaps in part shaped by that cover of Time was with us for until quite recently, I guess until the personal computer in the mid-'70s. 
00:54:42.503 --> 00:54:48.099
Nelson: And now we have the personal computer view which sees the computer as a narrow screen. 
00:54:48.099 --> 00:55:04.630
Nelson: For example, I was extremely annoyed at a, at an article in the Saturday Review, no The New Republic a couple of years ago which said that the computer screen can only hold, that's right, a word processor can only hold ideas as wide as the computer screen. 
00:55:04.630 --> 00:55:18.782
Nelson: No I wrote a letter to The New Republic saying that The New Republic by, of the same token could only hold ideas 44 characters wide because that was the width of the column in The New Republic, but they didn't print it. 
00:55:18.782 --> 00:55:32.097
Nelson: In any case, so the, this cliché about a computer screen being a narrow thing about 50 or maybe 128 characters wide already this is dead, because now we have computer screens two feet wide on Macs and Suns. 
00:55:32.097 --> 00:55:39.366
Nelson: And within another ten years they'll be four feet wide and they'll be three dimensional, we'll have the goggles. 
00:55:39.366 --> 00:55:49.787
Nelson: So already we're now seeing a cliché computer world where the computer most people have seen is the MS-DOS IBM PC clone with the little screen that is only text. 
00:55:49.787 --> 00:55:59.564
Nelson: And...ah, but it's, the evolution is so fast, the moving storm of computer progress leaves so many stagnant puddles and in which teem interesting life. 
00:55:59.564 --> 00:56:10.371
Nelson: And so there are many different computer worlds, each one with its own obsessions and so the public concept depends entirely on what computer person they've talked to. 
00:56:10.371 --> 00:56:15.002
Nelson: Now most computer people are obsessed but each at some different level. 
00:56:15.002 --> 00:56:43.499
Nelson: Now my obsession is with the overall objectives and making wonderful systems for the whole world that aren't held back by technical considerations whereas many guys, the ones I call technoids or chipmunks, tend to be obsessed by the individual details let's say of each new chip that comes out so they want to study these things in detail and memorize them and read them backwards at great length and tend to turn away from the larger issues. 
00:56:43.499 --> 00:56:59.387
Nelson: Well I think the larger issues are what count and making the public, helping the public see what the large issues of computers are going to be like, are going to be about, this is the real problem, the larger issues that computer have to do with. 
00:56:59.387 --> 00:57:11.223
Nelson: Personal freedom, for example, now of course they can track where convicts go, they put an electronic ball and chain on them issues of tracking who reads what in electronic libraries. 
00:57:11.223 --> 00:57:16.755
Nelson: I think it's very important that we not track who reads what in electronic libraries. 
00:57:16.755 --> 00:57:34.444
Nelson: Issues of well who's going to have access and really what's happening is basically...it's going to be a market system which is in some ways sad because some people won't be able to afford computers but at the same time so many people will that it will be overall beneficial. 
00:57:34.444 --> 00:57:48.146
Nelson: But there are very many great issues about the future of computing and helping the public see what they are rather than be swayed by this or that cliche of computers is absolutely vital, I hope your program helps.
00:57:48.146 --> 00:57:55.335
Interviewer: HOW IMPORTANT IS NETWORKING AND HOW IS IT TRANSFORMING HOW COMPUTERS EFFECT SOCIETY?
00:57:55.335 --> 00:57:57.742
Nelson: Computer networking means many things. 
00:57:57.742 --> 00:58:11.008
Nelson: For example, in many in many companies a computer network can be a network of small computers that are essentially behaving altogether as...one big one, or it can be many people phoning into a big central computer. 
00:58:11.008 --> 00:58:24.582
Nelson: When I lived in Texas right around the corner was this large complex which an airline had, I had to walk by there at night and there were all these people sitting at desks receiving reservations from all over the world. 
00:58:24.582 --> 00:58:27.050
Nelson: And so that was, you know, kind of odd. 
00:58:27.050 --> 00:58:59.628
Nelson: And so there are...there are many different kinds of computer networks and the conferencing networks now like The WELL and other conferences on things like CompuServe and the Source allow people to dial in and have conversations with other users all over the world and they don't know if they're talking to a retired four star general or to a teenager and this in many ways is considered extremely liberating because they can speak and write freely and create these long collections of letters and diatribes that can be shared. 
00:58:59.628 --> 00:59:23.259
Nelson: This is an extremely interesting development, the only problem, one of the problems with it being that a conversation on The WELL can't be read by someone who is subscribing to CompuServe and vice versa and there are so many Balkanized different conversations we don't yet have a way to pool them all, which is one of the objectives of the Xanadu publishing system we're working on. 
00:59:23.259 --> 00:59:40.104
Nelson: So networking is these many different ways of tying information together and I don't think it's any one thing so I can't really characterize it, nor can I say what it's leading to in particular, because like the computer itself it's leading in so many different directions.
00:59:40.103 --> 00:59:46.780
Interviewer: WANT TO GIVE US THE, I DON'T KNOW HOW MANY MINUTE VERSION YOU WANT TO TELL US ABOUT XANADU.
00:59:46.780 --> 01:00:08.425
Nelson: It's a little difficult to talk about Xanadu quickly because it's taken me so long, I've worked on it for 30 years now and it's such a simple concept that almost no one has been able to understand it until now because they always said, "Well, where's the Framiss?" or "What about the Tweedledum?" and they couldn't look at the big concept. 
01:00:08.425 --> 01:00:12.691
Nelson: The big concept of Xanadu can be most easily expressed as follows. 
01:00:12.691 --> 01:00:44.905
Nelson: Imagine the year 2020, I like to call this "the 2020 vision," when a billion people around the earth are sitting at screens, each able to reach into the common pool of documents, you might call it a library or a repository, and pull to the screen any fragment of text, any footnote, any illustration, any piece of audio, any piece of sheet music, any piece of video or motion picture, paying for the individual fragment at the instant of delivery with an automatic royalty being remanded to the publisher. 
01:00:44.905 --> 01:00:46.879
Nelson: So it's a very simple concept. 
01:00:46.879 --> 01:00:48.152
Nelson: Oh, one more thing. 
01:00:48.152 --> 01:00:50.953
Nelson: Anyone at any instant may publish anything. 
01:00:50.953 --> 01:01:18.011
Nelson: So you just, if you've written a comment you like on something, you just type it in and press the publish button and bingo now it's available around the world and if anyone should happen to read it for some reason because they like your things you've written before or they are curious about what's been added as a footnote to that document, they can get that fragment out with automatic royalty to you at a very small cost. 
01:01:18.011 --> 01:01:23.104
Nelson: So it's a very small royalty to you but the whole point is that it accumulates. 
01:01:23.104 --> 01:01:38.129
Nelson: So this simple concept which I think is the obvious extension, you see, when the computer screen was invented, we arrived at a divide in human...in the history of human culture like that of the printing press, and people didn't get it. 
01:01:38.129 --> 01:01:46.023
Nelson: The...they bring the Macintosh out and it's used for word processing for God's sake or what they call desktop publish, i.e. 
01:01:46.023 --> 01:01:49.652
Nelson: typesetting sequential documents to be printed on paper. 
01:01:49.652 --> 01:02:14.418
Nelson: That's like driving a 747 on the highway, okay? To use the computer as a paper simulator rather than as a window to the great new shared world of the human culture because here are the libraries with all this great stuff in them but we can't get at it, you can't get at...just because a book is published doesn't mean it's accessible, it just means that someone somewhere once had a copy. 
01:02:14.418 --> 01:02:17.792
Nelson: Whether that book even exists anywhere is not clear. 
01:02:17.792 --> 01:02:26.769
Nelson: So with the Xanadu system we'll be able to create a repository that can grow indefinitely without slowing down substantially in performance. 
01:02:26.769 --> 01:02:43.194
Nelson: In fact it should be able to keep up with, to continue fast delivery in the year 2020 even when there are a trillion documents with a trillion links between them and people are adding a billion documents a day let's say as the thing really gets up to speed. 
01:02:43.194 --> 01:02:48.924
Nelson: This will essential...this will essentially become the replacement of the printing press. 
01:02:48.924 --> 01:03:00.893
Nelson: Now people thought I was crazy when I talked about this in 1960 and in 1970 and the funny—what really rocks me back on my heels now is that they, oh of course that's how it's going to be. 
01:03:00.893 --> 01:03:15.154
Nelson: And I say what because it's, it's very strange having promoted this idea which I think was perfectly obvious in 1960 for all these years and being treated as if I were completely nuts and then having people suddenly get it. 
01:03:15.154 --> 01:03:16.172
Nelson: It's very nice. 
01:03:16.172 --> 01:03:35.909
Nelson: The hard part was the software because what was needed was not just a simple delivery program based on the way people delivered -- the way computers delivered documents before but rather a very intricate program designed to speedily deliver fragments from an ever growing pool of computers on a great network. 
01:03:35.909 --> 01:03:39.728
Nelson: And so we have been pushing the state of the art in design. 
01:03:39.728 --> 01:03:43.485
Nelson: The chief architect, Mark Miller, is an extraordinary guy. 
01:03:43.485 --> 01:03:50.169
Nelson: Roger Gregory, who held the technical side of the project together for a decade is an extraordinary guy. 
01:03:50.169 --> 01:04:00.674
Nelson: And, and the people who've actually gone and built it, I take credit for the inspiration but not for the actual building, have been a marvelous and wonderful group. 
01:04:00.674 --> 01:04:06.022
Nelson: And and the company that's sponsoring it, Autodesk, has also been very foresighted. 
01:04:06.022 --> 01:04:18.245
Nelson: There are those who think it's, the enormous success of Autodesk in creating a worldwide standard for drawing on screens was an accident, I assure you it happened because they were very smart.
01:04:18.246 --> 01:04:21.073
Interviewer: STOP TAPE FOR A SECOND. 
01:04:21.073 --> 01:04:22.251
Interviewer: [TAPE CUT]
01:04:30.268 --> 01:04:35.619
Nelson: ...I had the good fortune to get to know John Mauchly before he died. 
01:04:35.619 --> 01:04:47.163
Nelson: He was the wonderful man who had headed up the development of the ENIAC at the Moore School in University of Pennsylvania at the, during World War II. 
01:04:47.163 --> 01:05:09.564
Nelson: And he was an absolutely delightful guy, I guess he was in his seventies, and wonderfully charming and outgoing and friendly, but I couldn't quite figure out...as he told his stories there was talk that I was going to help him ghost write, ghost write his autobiography but it didn't pan out. 
01:05:09.564 --> 01:05:23.401
Nelson: I couldn't understand what his contribution could be because he—could have been because he couldn't seem to stay on the topic and he rambled, but he was so charming and delightful. 
01:05:23.401 --> 01:05:30.053
Nelson: And then he died suddenly and I was very broken up about it and I went to his funeral. 
01:05:30.053 --> 01:05:44.961
Nelson: And at the party suddenly afterward suddenly I understood what Mauchly had done because here were all these people in their sixties, but the most dynamic, bright group of people I had ever seen. 
01:05:44.961 --> 01:05:52.759
Nelson: And it became immediately clear what Mauchly had done, he brought them together and he inspired them. 
01:05:52.759 --> 01:06:26.474
Nelson: And so, and, anyway Mauchly was a tremendously delightful guy and he was annoyed to the very end that John Von Neumann had gotten credit for the idea of the stored program computer because he said Von Neumann had come to their lab at the University of Pennsylvania and they had been under military nondisclosure and Von Neumann was not and simply went out and wrote up all the ideas as his own, that's what, that anyway was Mauchly's claim. 
01:06:26.474 --> 01:06:31.444
Nelson: But it was a very great honor to be able to know a guy like that.
01:06:31.443 --> 01:06:34.525
Interviewer: HE WAS AT WENT TO ONE OF THE PC EXPOS...
01:06:34.525 --> 01:06:36.455
Nelson: Excuse me, I get tears in my eyes just thinking about it... 
01:06:36.455 --> 01:06:36.809
Nelson: If he what?
01:06:36.809 --> 01:06:38.186
Interviewer: HE WAS AT ATLANTIC CITY?
01:06:38.186 --> 01:06:45.858
Nelson: Probably...I yeah he got around, he was very popular.
01:06:45.858 --> 01:06:50.146
Interviewer: ANY OTHER THOUGHTS?
01:06:50.146 --> 01:06:55.474
Nelson: Yeah, we're moving into a very strange new age with some very sinister aspects. 
01:06:55.474 --> 01:07:05.930
Nelson: It may be that we haven't even recognized what the dangers are going to be of computers and the biggest problem is people being aware of what they might be. 
01:07:05.930 --> 01:07:09.793
Nelson: And they can pop up out of nowhere like computer viruses. 
01:07:09.793 --> 01:07:17.918
Nelson: Computer viruses two years ago were theoretical and suddenly they're with us now as a real danger to your personal files. 
01:07:17.918 --> 01:07:34.367
Nelson: And we don't know what it's going to be next time, but it's a sure thing that the authentic storage of true documents is going to be a tremendous issues because once a document is on a computer there's absolutely no way a forgery can be detected. 
01:07:34.367 --> 01:07:48.619
Nelson: It's not as though you could examine the paper and do chemical tests of the paper, the handwriting, you just have this document that are these words and you have to judge by external evidence whether they're real. 
01:07:48.619 --> 01:07:56.744
Nelson: Now when Oliver North's correspondence was discovered in backup files, they had external evidence to show what they were. 
01:07:56.744 --> 01:08:02.404
Nelson: But when those things are coming at you through networks, they'll be no way to tell. 
01:08:02.404 --> 01:08:06.533
Nelson: So the door is open to the Winston Smith world of the future. 
01:08:06.533 --> 01:08:13.593
Nelson: And in 1984, Winston Smith the hero had as his job to rewrite history and that could actually come about. 
01:08:13.593 --> 01:08:21.451
Nelson: With the new electronic cameras there's no film, there's just an image made on a video disk which is sent down the... 
01:08:21.451 --> 01:08:24.715
Nelson: down the line back to the back to the newspaper. 
01:08:24.715 --> 01:08:31.441
Nelson: And the forgery of perfect photographs is now possible especially through computer retouching means. 
01:08:31.441 --> 01:08:58.679
Nelson: So that means the chain of evidence that was possible before for a photograph is no longer possible, so that the so-called authentication methods for determining the documents are real and for assur -- and methods for assuring that the real documents are stored, these are going to be extremely important in the future, especially as more and more sophisticated forgers turn up who know all the ins and outs. 
01:08:58.679 --> 01:09:08.735
Nelson: To have a forger paste a picture of a bicycle in Leonardo da Vinci's codex, I mean that's nothing compared to what can, what can happen in the future. 
01:09:08.735 --> 01:09:17.460
Nelson: And, and I think we're scarcely aware of how serious this problem is because anyone in any generation could rewrite all of history.
01:09:24.777 --> 01:09:27.801
Interviewer: WHAT IF IT'S ON MANY DIFFERENT SYSTEMS?
01:09:27.801 --> 01:09:40.026
Nelson: Yeah, how could we, how could we fight this? Well one way is to keep records on many different systems, but of course since a copy can proliferate so fast or be deleted so fast that isn't itself a solution. 
01:09:40.026 --> 01:10:14.990
Nelson: One of the things that's being talked about that's extremely important is the authentication code which is a process applied to a file after the file is created which cannot be undone or allow the file to be changed, so that if you have, if you authenticate if you put an authentication code on a document, then when the document is supplied with that authentication code, you can perform the same process and come out with that code and therefore know that it hasn't been changed because there's no way it could have been—the document could have been changed and still yield that same code. 
01:10:14.990 --> 01:10:18.297
Nelson: That's the kind of thing that people are looking at now.
01:10:18.297 --> 01:10:19.600
Interviewer: ELECTRONIC ENVELOPE.
01:10:19.600 --> 01:10:22.597
Nelson: Electronic envelope is another term, yeah. 
01:10:22.597 --> 01:10:29.426
Nelson: And so this is just one threat and of course being able to track—oh there are many other threads. 
01:10:29.426 --> 01:10:42.944
Nelson: Being able to track individuals and persecute individuals, not just have a government persecute individuals but have individuals persecute other individuals electronically will be all too easy. 
01:10:42.944 --> 01:10:54.790
Nelson: Having organized crime persecute other individuals, having using computer networks illicitly for a vast variety of purposes that clever people can begin to use them for. 
01:10:54.790 --> 01:10:58.901
Nelson: This is, this is very threatening but all we can hope for. 
01:10:58.901 --> 01:11:04.963
Nelson: The answer I think is more understanding rather than trying to suppress any part of it.
01:11:04.963 --> 01:11:12.787
Interviewer: ...I GUESS WE'RE SEEING THE EXTREME EXAMPLE OF INFORMATION AS POWER AND WE'RE CHANGING THE POWER STRUCTURES.
01:11:12.787 --> 01:11:22.179
Nelson: Information as power, yes we're...we are seeing information as power in new forms, but of course information has always been power. 
01:11:22.179 --> 01:11:35.343
Nelson: In ancient days if you possessed the map and the other guy didn't, you held a unique—well even today if you have the map and the, your adversary doesn't, you have the unique advantage. 
01:11:35.343 --> 01:11:45.447
Nelson: And indeed so many services for the business world are based on supplying information of a type your...competition may not think to look for. 
01:11:45.447 --> 01:12:12.558
Nelson: So that, information as power is not an intrinsic change, but the kinds of information that are available and the kinds of power they yield may be very different because of course -- well what was it in Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court? The hero played by Bing Crosby in the movie was able to seize power by predicting the eclipse of the moon or the sun, whatever it was. 
01:12:12.558 --> 01:12:25.437
Nelson: And, and this of course was tremendously impressive to the, to the locals because they didn't have that information and perhaps the same thing will come about in the future from... 
01:12:25.437 --> 01:12:32.908
Nelson: well whoever has the information has leverage, whether you can use that information is another question. 
01:12:32.908 --> 01:12:42.941
Nelson: For example, you know, thirty years ago I knew personal computing was going to be the hot stuff, and I was not able to use this as leverage. 
01:12:42.941 --> 01:12:47.140
Nelson: So just having the...information is not necessarily enough.
01:12:47.140 --> 01:12:50.067
Interviewer: ...GENERAL QUESTION I'M ASKING EVERYBODY. 
01:12:50.067 --> 01:12:56.551
Interviewer: CAN YOU REMEMBER YOUR FIRST IMPRESSION OF A COMPUTER, YOUR FIRST RECOLLECTIONS OF A COMPUTER?
01:12:56.551 --> 01:13:26.925
Nelson: My first recollection...my first recollections of a computer, well heck, I was an avid reader of Time magazine when I was about ten or eleven and somewhere around that time, that would be 1947 or '48, there was a cover story on...in Time on the computer with one of the wonderful covers by Artzybasheff who portrayed it as an octopus and it was an extraordinarily good piece and I read it with great care and great interest. 
01:13:26.925 --> 01:13:49.581
Nelson: And a couple of years later my grandfather and I went up to an exhibit of Leonardo da Vinci models up at the IBM intergalactic headquarters on 57th Street and right next door they had a huge relay computer with which would go clickety-click behind glass and supposedly they were commuting the trajectory of the moon. 
01:13:49.581 --> 01:13:52.082
Nelson: And this was all very interesting. 
01:13:52.082 --> 01:13:56.227
Nelson: You stood inside the computer with the relays around you. 
01:13:56.227 --> 01:14:12.522
Nelson: I don't remember whether it glowed or not, I had the feeling it glowed but it shouldn't have so, in any case it was, it was wonderful but I had no idea what a computer was, I was still under the thrall of the mathematical myth. 
01:14:12.522 --> 01:14:23.028
Nelson: And then when I took a course finally in computing programming in 1960 and it was the first one that had been available to non-mathematical types. 
01:14:23.028 --> 01:14:33.606
Nelson: Sudden the scales fell from my eyes and I realized what a fraud everyone had perpetrated because the computer was not a mathematical device at all. 
01:14:33.606 --> 01:14:50.044
Nelson: And so my feelings were a mixture of indignation, hilarity and lust because here was the perfect typewriter, the perfect movie machine for all the, all the movies I wanted to make and all the articles and books I wanted to write. 
01:14:50.044 --> 01:15:05.838
Nelson: If only just a little bit of software could be created to make it do what was so self evidently, so...self righteously obvious as the destined true use of this machine, and I've been working on that for the last 30 years.
01:15:05.838 --> 01:15:11.854
Interviewer: WHY DO YOU THINK IT WAS OBVIOUS TO YOU THAT IT WASN'T PRIMARILY OR SOLELY A MATHEMATICAL MACHINE OR ARITHMETIC MACHINE?
01:15:11.854 --> 01:15:14.166
Nelson: Well it...well it was obvious to me. 
01:15:14.166 --> 01:15:21.293
Nelson: I mean, why is it obvious that the computer is not an arithmetic machine, but it is obvious, I mean it's obvious. 
01:15:21.293 --> 01:15:25.356
Nelson: Now most people hadn't caught it because the machine had been... 
01:15:25.356 --> 01:15:55.173
Nelson: essentially a kept mistress of the mathematical and scientific community and forced to engage in certain pursuits with no let up and therefore never generally recognized that these were just as legitimate—I mean they'd put labels on their, on their files and occasionally text strings in there but they didn't feel that this was a legitimate or proper use, it was just something it had to do whereas of course it's just any use of the computer is perfectly legitimate whatever.
01:15:55.173 --> 01:15:58.190
Interviewer: DESCRIBE THE COMPUTING EXPERIENCE THOUGH IN THOSE DAYS. 
01:15:58.190 --> 01:16:08.046
Interviewer: IT'S ONE THING TO REALIZE IT COULD HAVE ENORMOUS POTENTIAL, BUT YOU DIDN'T OWN A COMPUTER DID YOU? YOU HAD TO USE THE ONES THAT WERE AVAILABLE, WHAT WAS IT LIKE PROGRAMMING SOMETHING?
01:16:08.046 --> 01:16:13.157
Nelson: What was it like to program at that time? Well you see I never even got near a computer. 
01:16:13.157 --> 01:16:25.793
Nelson: The program I wrote in, for my term project in the fall of 1960 did not get completed, I did not attempt to run it, I flunked the course and I was thrown out of Harvard with a terminal Master's degree instead of a Ph.D. 
01:16:25.793 --> 01:16:28.320
Nelson: which was what I went there for originally. 
01:16:28.320 --> 01:16:47.445
Nelson: But I never I never got near a computer 'til years later I was essentially designing in my mind which was the right thing to do because I was very good at imagining how it should be and that emerged as my function and that's what I've been doing all these years and with, to good effect, although it was a very peculiar career route.
01:16:47.445 --> 01:16:56.930
Interviewer: I MEAN CERTAIN THINGS HAD TO HAPPEN TO THIS MAINFRAME TYPE OF COMPUTER FOR THE VISION TO BE REALIZED, COULD YOU LIST SOME OF THOSE, HAD TO GET SMALLER, INTERACTIVE, WHAT...?
01:16:56.930 --> 01:17:02.717
Nelson: Many people think that great changes were necessary in the computer to make it personally useful. 
01:17:02.717 --> 01:17:04.843
Nelson: I think this is a misunderstanding. 
01:17:04.843 --> 01:17:08.151
Nelson: I want to, I want to bring about a revisionist history. 
01:17:08.151 --> 01:17:18.486
Nelson: The real, the truth is that computers were always perfectly well suited to personal use, it was just that they were too expensive and they required too much air conditioning. 
01:17:18.486 --> 01:17:35.377
Nelson: But aside from that there is absolutely no reason we couldn't have used them and I was, I was eagerly awaiting my chance to buy my own 7090, I thought I would get rich enough somehow or that there'd be a way to actually do this and in fact now I have one except it's called a Macintosh.
01:17:35.377 --> 01:17:46.720
Interviewer: YOU DIDN'T PROGRAM THAT FIRST COMPUTER IN YOUR COURSE, WHEN DID YOU GET INVOLVED AS A PROGRAMMER, WHEN DID YOU HAVE THE ROMANCE OF ACTUALLY TRYING TO GET THE COMPUTER TO DO...
01:17:46.720 --> 01:17:47.920
Nelson: I'm not a programmer, I never have.
01:17:47.920 --> 01:17:52.474
Interviewer: WHEN DID GET THE SENSE, YOU GET MORE ACTIVELY ENGAGED WITH THE COMPUTER?
01:17:52.474 --> 01:17:53.184
Nelson: Never.
01:17:53.184 --> 01:17:53.884
Interviewer: OR NEVER —
01:17:53.884 --> 01:18:06.575
Nelson: No I mean what I...what I have always done since the fall of 1960 is designing interactive software for personal use on computer screens and this does not require any sort of contact, any direct contact with the machine. 
01:18:06.575 --> 01:18:14.385
Nelson: In fact, direct...contact with a machine is merely distracting because it's doing something else, it's not doing what you wanted to do. 
01:18:14.385 --> 01:18:22.884
Nelson: The whole point is to imagine the way it should be and bring that, and elucidate that in the structure of the program, the structure of the design. 
01:18:22.884 --> 01:18:39.136
Nelson: I'm now working on a generalized design for a complete personal integrated software system and it's of no use to me to look at the machine while I think of this because I'm looking in my mind at the way it should perform under different circumstances and that's what design is about.
01:18:39.136 --> 01:18:49.319
Interviewer: NOW, YOU USED A TERM -- THE COMPUTER IS A VERY STRANGE SORT OF ANIMAL, THAT IT'S PART MACHINE BUT IT ALSO PARTLY BEHAVES LIKE A MEDIUM -- YOU USED THE TERM "LITERARY MACHINE." WHAT DO YOU MEAN BY THAT?
01:18:49.319 --> 01:19:07.950
Nelson: You know I forgot one thing—I usually tape my own - [MISC. 
01:19:07.950 --> 01:19:11.423
Nelson: DISCUSSION]
01:19:16.270 --> 01:19:21.279
Interviewer: THIS MACHINE WAS INVENTED AS SORT OF AN ARITHMETIC ENGINE... 
01:19:21.279 --> 01:19:31.377
Interviewer: AND AS YOU ALREADY ATTESTED YOU REALIZED THAT WAS A BIT OF A FRAUD, AND LATER ON YOU CALLED THIS THING A LITERARY MACHINE. 
01:19:31.377 --> 01:19:33.429
Interviewer: WHAT DO YOU MEAN BY THAT?
01:19:33.430 --> 01:19:45.794
Nelson: Well...see, our old literary machines were printing presses and bookshelves, and the printing press allowed us to create these packages and to distribute them inexpensively. 
01:19:45.794 --> 01:19:55.530
Nelson: And the bookshelf allowed them -- allowed us to find them when we had them and the very...the very big bookshelves are called libraries. 
01:19:55.530 --> 01:20:09.600
Nelson: And the good news is that we're publishing more documents now than ever before, and the bad news is you can't get at them, you have to buy them or do without or send for them, it's quite elaborate. 
01:20:09.600 --> 01:20:24.594
Nelson: And it just makes so much sense to have a great repository where all documents are stored from which any portion can be extracted innocently and have automatic royalty and various other nice features like that. 
01:20:24.594 --> 01:20:30.563
Nelson: Linkage so you can create a document which couples to other things that are stored. 
01:20:30.563 --> 01:20:34.330
Nelson: And so a literary machine then is such a document... 
01:20:34.330 --> 01:20:40.867
Nelson: is such as storage device set up to provide a repository of stored documents to every user. 
01:20:40.867 --> 01:20:44.492
Nelson: And that's what I've been working on all this time.
01:20:44.492 --> 01:20:54.368
Interviewer: THE COMPUTER CAN DO -- YOU MEANT IT IN THAT SENSE, A COMPUTER OF COURSE IS A UNIVERSAL MACHINE, RIGHT, IF IT'S LITERARY, IT CAN DO THAT, BUT ALSO IT CAN DO ALSO LOTS OF OTHER THINGS. 
01:20:54.368 --> 01:21:02.086
Interviewer: CAN YOU TELL ME ABOUT YOUR READING OF THIS, WHEN YOU REALIZED THE MACHINE WAS A RATHER SPECIAL MACHINE AND IT COULD BE PUT TO DIFFERENT MEANS. 
01:21:02.086 --> 01:21:10.721
Interviewer: WHAT'S ACTUALLY GOING ON? THERE'S A SORT OF LINGUISTIC, IT'S ALMOST LIKE WE'VE GOT A MACHINE WHICH IS DESIGNED WHERE IT CAN DO SOMETHING AT ONE LEVEL BUT BY... 
01:21:10.721 --> 01:21:16.171
Interviewer: SOFTWARE TURNS IT INTO OTHER SORTS OF VIRTUAL MACHINES, DOESN'T IT? I WONDER IF YOU COULD EXPLAIN IT?
01:21:16.171 --> 01:21:27.870
Nelson: Well, you see the computer is a totally blank device, and this of course -- first of all, this was not obvious when it was being paraded as a mathematical and scientific machine. 
01:21:27.870 --> 01:21:56.693
Nelson: And secondly, today the computer no longer arrives on your doorstep naked like an orphan, but comes dressed in all sorts of armor and you can't really get at the functions that it had, chastity belts and whatnot, you can't get at the things that it's actually capable of doing unless you either program in the ways that have been allowed open for you or you use a can opener to find your way into the functions you would like it to perform. 
01:21:56.693 --> 01:22:09.765
Nelson: So that creating the virtual machine you want, making this all-purpose machine, as John Von Neumann called it, into a, into the particular responding entity that you want is a terrific amount of work.
01:22:09.765 --> 01:22:19.002
Interviewer: YOU SPOKE LAST TIME WHEN YOU WERE INTERVIEWED ABOUT BEING SORT OF SEDUCED -- IT'S A SEDUCTIVE THING, ONCE YOU DIP YOUR TOE IN THIS TASK YOU GET DRAWN IN. 
01:22:19.002 --> 01:22:28.779
Interviewer: IS THAT WHAT REALLY APPEALED TO THE HACKERS IN THE LATE '50S AND EVERYBODY EVER SINCE THEN...THAT HERE'S A MACHINE WHICH WILL DO YOUR BIDDING IF YOU TELL IT RIGHT?
01:22:28.779 --> 01:22:46.192
Nelson: Well yes, yeah, it will do -- the good news is it will do your bidding, the good news is the computer will do your bidding exactly as you tell it to and the bad news is that's it's always much harder to get it to do this than you ever imagined. 
01:22:46.192 --> 01:22:57.350
Nelson: Supposedly one of the reasons that some of the settlers in Venezuela got to be so achievement oriented is that they inherited they conquered very bad mines. 
01:22:57.350 --> 01:22:59.412
Nelson: Venezuelan means lousy vein. 
01:22:59.412 --> 01:23:17.393
Nelson: And so the Venezuelan settlers who got hold of these mines unlike the ones who conquered the Incas, had to work the mines themselves because it was useless to try to enslave people, they couldn't feed the slaves if they—so they had to do it themselves. 
01:23:17.393 --> 01:23:43.903
Nelson: And hackers, that is, enthusiastic computer people which are hackers, unfortunately the word has come to have another meaning in the popular presses, but people who love computers have tried to get them to do what they wanted and found they had to do it themselves, there was no slave bureau or employment agency that could find someone who would get it to do it your way. 
01:23:43.903 --> 01:23:47.598
Nelson: So a hacker then, you become a hacker by necessity. 
01:23:47.598 --> 01:23:55.345
Nelson: Either you are going to make it work your way or you're going to have to settle for what somebody else does. 
01:23:55.345 --> 01:23:59.325
Nelson: And this is this is a very irritating state of affairs. 
01:23:59.325 --> 01:24:08.494
Nelson: We would all like to just lie back and say out loud the wish we have in mind and it, the computer doesn't quite respond that way.
01:24:08.493 --> 01:24:22.106
Interviewer: YOU SPOKE LAST TIME A BIT ABOUT IVAN SUTHERLAND AND DOUG ENGELBART, I WANT TO ASK YOU THIS TIME HOW MUCH DID YOU KNOW ABOUT THE WORK GOING ON AT XEROX PARC WHEN IT WAS GETTING ON, WAS THAT WELL KNOWN TO PEOPLE LIKE YOURSELF?
01:24:22.106 --> 01:24:24.829
Nelson: The work at Xerox PARC started about 1970. 
01:24:24.829 --> 01:24:32.996
Nelson: Essentially all of my creative contributions in the field took place between—before 1965 and I was in no way influenced by that. 
01:24:32.996 --> 01:24:40.783
Nelson: I did hear about Sutherland's work in the early '60s and I used his movies when I was teaching at Vassar in 1964, in 1965. 
01:24:40.783 --> 01:25:00.029
Nelson: I did not hear about Engelbart's work I think until '65, actually I argued, I discussed this with Engelbart at dinner last night and neither of us could remember when we first heard of the other but I think it was in...1965 I first heard of Doug Engelbart, and by that time all my designs were in place. 
01:25:00.029 --> 01:25:09.399
Nelson: The thing is that Doug, wonderful, saintly Doug Engelbart wants to create a world in which people can work together, which is a fabulous objective. 
01:25:09.399 --> 01:25:18.389
Nelson: My own personal objective always was to create a world in which I didn't need to work with other people because I really hated collaboration. 
01:25:18.389 --> 01:25:29.974
Nelson: And the irony of it that well the irony...is that Doug had to go it alone and I've had to learn how to collaborate so we've each had to turn in the direction we didn't exactly intend.
01:25:29.975 --> 01:25:45.775
Interviewer: ON THE XEROX PARC THING, DID YOU EVER VISIT PARC DURING THOSE TIMES? AND CLEARLY ONE OF THE THINGS ABOUT YOUR VISION OF COMPUTING IS THAT IT TOOK A LONG TIME TO COME ABOUT —
01:25:45.775 --> 01:25:50.375
Nelson: It hasn't come about, not nearly...I don't find any software acceptable in the present day.
01:25:50.375 --> 01:26:00.688
Interviewer: WHAT WAS YOUR REACTION TO THE WORK GOING ON THERE, WAS THAT SORT OF PRETTY CUTTING EDGE OF THE AS REGARDS WHAT WAS AVAILABLE AT THE TIME?
01:26:00.688 --> 01:26:02.202
Nelson: It wasn't available. 
01:26:02.202 --> 01:26:23.400
Nelson: I first visited Xerox PARC I think somewhere between '70 and '72, I'm not sure when, and I was of course overwhelmed and impressed and wished they would hire me, I never sent them a job application because if you have to apply, that means you won't be hired anyway, somebody has to want you... 
01:26:23.400 --> 01:26:27.438
Nelson: But it was fabulous the toys and the goodies they have. 
01:26:27.438 --> 01:26:41.499
Nelson: Of course what wasn't clear was that it was a great concatenation of demonstrations and you had to know the right buttons to push that wouldn't crash the system like any, like any demonstration. 
01:26:41.499 --> 01:26:44.599
Nelson: But it certainly was unlike anywhere else. 
01:26:44.599 --> 01:26:59.308
Nelson: MIT and a few other universities and oddly enough a private university on Long Island were doing a great deal...of spearheaded research but Xerox PARC was where all the toys were, it was the big sandbox. 
01:26:59.308 --> 01:27:06.375
Nelson: And everyone envied it and it was a, it was a very strange place though because I always found... 
01:27:06.375 --> 01:27:29.160
Nelson: there was a strange level of tension at Xerox PARC, I don't know how much of the tension was my own tension at the time because I was a very angry young man and how much of it was real, but it was a, certainly a place where there was extreme competition under a surface veneer, a convention of everyone acting cool. 
01:27:29.160 --> 01:27:49.421
Nelson: So you had this curious push pull between, a double bind between having to be Californian and sit on bean bags and play and play volleyball at lunchtime, I don't think they do that anymore so much and the fact that you were under terrific peer pressure as a computer professional. 
01:27:49.421 --> 01:27:58.001
Nelson: And there was, the conversation at Xerox PARC and among PARCees is, at least was at the time intensely status oriented.
01:27:58.002 --> 01:28:05.948
Interviewer: SOME OF THE TOYS THEY CAME OUT WITH, WERE THEY WHAT YOU HAD IN MIND BACK IN 1960 SOMETHING LIKE THE ALTAIR?
01:28:05.948 --> 01:28:10.404
Nelson: Were the toys that Xerox had in mind what I had in mind? No, no. 
01:28:10.404 --> 01:28:12.049
Nelson: It's a different model. 
01:28:12.049 --> 01:28:13.420
Nelson: The windowing of... 
01:28:13.420 --> 01:28:20.688
Nelson: the windowing of the Xerox PARC stuff I find still unacceptable although it's passed into the vernacular. 
01:28:20.688 --> 01:28:27.338
Nelson: The trouble is you can't make a mark between the center of one window and the center of another. 
01:28:27.338 --> 01:28:43.792
Nelson: I want to show in one window a side view or a textural description let's and on the, in the other view a different picture and have a line or a band going from the description in one window to the thing it's describing in the other window. 
01:28:43.792 --> 01:28:51.881
Nelson: There's no way to do that in existing so that what they did, imaginative and elegant as it was, left a great deal out.
01:28:51.881 --> 01:29:00.429
Interviewer: IT CONCENTRATED ON THE LOOK RATHER THAN ON THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE CONTENT?
01:29:00.429 --> 01:29:21.176
Nelson: There is a Xerox PARC style which was taken over into the Macintosh and has now been copied into Microsoft Windows and the Amiga and various other windowing systems that leaves out a great deal and that ignores some of the fundamental structures I think are vital to elucidate. 
01:29:21.176 --> 01:29:23.489
Nelson: So yes it, they left out a lot.
01:29:23.489 --> 01:29:42.152
Interviewer: HOW WOULD YOU HAVE -- RATHER, SEEING THE HISTORY, YOU SUGGESTED JUST A MINUTE AGO IN YOUR REVISIONIST VERSION THAT IT WASN'T THE MACHINERY THAT WAS LIMITING, I MEAN IT WAS THE COST, BUT YOU THINK IT'S LARGELY A SOFTWARE PROBLEM IN MAKING THIS THING BECAUSE YOU USED THE TERM, YOU INVENTED THE TERM VIRTUALITY, DIDN'T YOU?
01:29:42.152 --> 01:29:42.863
Nelson: Hra hmm.
01:29:42.863 --> 01:29:48.631
Interviewer: DESCRIBE WHAT THAT WAS, AND GOOD VIRTUALITY IS THE THINGS THAT GIVE US LEVERAGE OR WHAT?
01:29:48.631 --> 01:30:05.872
Nelson: My history of computerdom of course begins with about seven different people inventing the computer independently ,and then its becoming stereotyped and enslaved as a numerical device which was only one possible function. 
01:30:05.872 --> 01:30:08.745
Nelson: Now there's an interesting anecdote. 
01:30:08.745 --> 01:30:25.131
Nelson: When Mauchly and Eckert who invented the computer at the Moore School of Electrical Engineering during the war took it to a private backer, they found such a backer and he was a manufacturer of racetrack signs. 
01:30:25.131 --> 01:30:54.486
Nelson: He was killed in an airplane crash, but if he hadn't been, it's interesting to conjecture whether the computer might not first have been called in it's commercial, first commercial version a text machine or an electronic text machine and whether or not the it would have taken an entirely different direction with word processing coming in before the mathematical applications. 
01:30:54.486 --> 01:30:58.059
Nelson: Probably not, but it's an amusing conjecture. 
01:30:58.059 --> 01:31:04.504
Nelson: So why then did it stay so long on that track? Well there were a number of things. 
01:31:04.504 --> 01:31:15.066
Nelson: And, and why was why were computer graphics suppressed for so long? One reason is that it was being sold so hard as a business machine. 
01:31:15.066 --> 01:31:38.674
Nelson: Another is that IBM, through the marketing of the 360 which essentially smothered most other computer companies for about a decade from 1964 to 1974 prevented the arrival of computer graphics into the firm and essentially the access to computer screens of the entire population for I would say a decade. 
01:31:38.674 --> 01:31:55.449
Nelson: And so the pent up computer hunger everywhere that made personal computers when they started marketing them much more cheaply made them explode into the workforce and into personal life with the impact that they did.
01:31:56.627 --> 01:32:10.040
Nelson: The notion of virtuality is the idea of the opposite of reality, okay? Reality is the nuts and bolts of the thing, the brick walls that hold up a building, the engine that makes a car go. 
01:32:10.040 --> 01:32:14.249
Nelson: But virtuality is the conceptual structure and feel, okay. 
01:32:14.249 --> 01:32:33.798
Nelson: And the conceptual structure and feel of a car—all cars have the conceptual structures, forward and back, left and right, start and stop, but they have a different feel and that's why, that's a lot of the reason people pay such ridiculous amounts of money for upscale cars. 
01:32:33.798 --> 01:32:46.712
Nelson: The feel of -- the virtuality of a building is that sweeping look that the architect may have tried to give it or perhaps just the everyday look of a, of a tin industrial building. 
01:32:46.712 --> 01:32:50.422
Nelson: But that still has a conceptual structure and feel. 
01:32:50.422 --> 01:32:59.340
Nelson: For example, in Frank Lloyd Wright's soaring and jagged structures you had this...had this remarkable look that he gives it. 
01:32:59.340 --> 01:33:06.689
Nelson: That's the virtuality of the building and you don't really know if it's made of concrete or cardboard. 
01:33:06.689 --> 01:33:19.174
Nelson: Okay, now the same issue comes up in software because really software is a conceptual structure of the field and so constructing this virtuality is an act of the imagination. 
01:33:19.174 --> 01:33:33.658
Nelson: The skills of programming are really what are like the hammers and nails that make that come together, but it's not the same thing as...but the real issue is the design that's in the mind of the creator.
01:33:33.658 --> 01:33:41.784
Interviewer: WHEN THAT VIRTUALITY IS DESIGNED PROPERLY, IT GIVES THE USER A GREAT DEAL OF...LEVERAGE IS THE WORD THAT'S OFTEN USED, ISN'T IT?
01:33:41.784 --> 01:33:43.073
Nelson: Well, I don't know...
01:33:43.073 --> 01:33:44.354
Interviewer: IS THERE ANOTHER WORD?
01:33:44.354 --> 01:33:48.286
Nelson: To me the design of virtuality is an art, pure and simple. 
01:33:48.286 --> 01:34:02.681
Nelson: The, there's an art to designing the handling of a car which is part of its virtuality, and there's a...there's an art designing a motion picture, which is called direction really, and that is creating a virtuality. 
01:34:02.681 --> 01:34:25.207
Nelson: And so that's why I say that software design is really a branch of movie making because you're dealing with screens and events on screens and the impact of events on screen on the mind and heart of the user, except you have the added the added quality that the user is exploring and able actively to influence what goes on in the screen. 
01:34:25.207 --> 01:34:51.066
Nelson: So it's a new multidimensional movie and I think the film schools are the right place to teach it, but computer programming itself is like being a cameraman for a movie, it's, it's a skill which is important but just as every cameraman thinks he's a director but very few directors are cameramen, it's a special talent and a special ability that has nothing to do with the technicalities.
01:34:51.065 --> 01:35:03.462
Interviewer: NOW WHEREAS SOME OF THE VIRTUALITIES THAT HAVE BEEN THOUGHT UP ARE REALLY SLAVISH IMITATIONS OF EXISTING MEDIA, AREN'T THEY? SO WORD PROCESSING WOULD BE NEAT, BUT WOULD YOU SAY PREDICTABLE?
01:35:03.462 --> 01:35:04.373
Nelson: You could say, hm hmm.
01:35:04.373 --> 01:35:09.574
Interviewer: BUT THE SPREADSHEET IS OFTEN CREDITED AS BEING A RATHER BRILLIANT THING, DO YOU AGREE?
01:35:09.574 --> 01:35:32.987
Nelson: Word processing in a way, well it's making the computer into a paper simulator and I was extremely disappointed in mankind when I saw the impact that world—word processing had because what it meant was that people didn't see where the future...of literature really lay which is in hypertext on the responding screen. 
01:35:32.987 --> 01:35:38.600
Nelson: It means that people are still thinking in terms of one page after another. 
01:35:38.600 --> 01:35:50.860
Nelson: Well that's okay, but the moving out of the paper simulation into virtualities that are detached from previous concepts, this is the heart of software design for me. 
01:35:50.860 --> 01:36:11.836
Nelson: And the spreadsheet is a good example because while it mimics in a way what corporate statisticians and sometimes managers did with paper spreadsheets, adding things up and subtracting them, erasing numbers, nevertheless it became a conceptual structure uniquely to—unique to itself. 
01:36:11.836 --> 01:36:33.106
Nelson: And well I had never seen a paper spreadsheet so to me it was an electronic concept from the very first and I think it very much goes beyond the paper because the way you...subdivide the screen for example into rows and columns and it can move and pan, this is a new conceptual structure.
01:36:33.106 --> 01:36:50.347
Interviewer: AND SOME PEOPLE ARGUE THAT THE EXISTENCE OF VISICALC WAS WHEN YOU GET A NEW VIRTUALITY AND IT HITS BULL'S EYE, IT'S TREMENDOUSLY EFFECTIVE IN A COMMERCIAL WAY, MANY PEOPLE ARGUE THAT VISICALC MADE ALL THE DIFFERENCE THE EARLY PERSONAL COMPUTER MARKET...
01:36:50.347 --> 01:36:50.827
Nelson: Yeah. 
01:36:50.827 --> 01:36:58.492
Nelson: I first saw VisiCalc I think around, somewhere, well just before it came out whenever that was. 
01:36:58.492 --> 01:37:04.240
Nelson: And shown to me by a fellow named Peter something or other from Canada. 
01:37:04.240 --> 01:37:11.825
Nelson: I said well this is going to revolutionize American industry, I think I called that one right. 
01:37:11.825 --> 01:37:26.357
Nelson: But yeah it had a tremendous impact and it is said that the Apple computer, Apple II that was actually got its foothold, caught on because VisiCalc was the program for the Apple II. 
01:37:26.357 --> 01:37:29.790
Nelson: And it was a beautifully designed one too. 
01:37:29.790 --> 01:37:40.409
Nelson: It's amazing how we went from as, such a well designed program as VisiCalc to some of the other spreadsheets which are rather clumsy.
01:37:40.409 --> 01:37:51.004
Interviewer: NOW IT'S QUITE INTERESTING THAT IN THE FORTY YEAR HISTORY OF THE COMPUTER PEOPLE STILL HAVE NOT MUCH OF AN IDEA OF WHAT SOFTWARE IS, THEY TEND TO SEE THE COMPUTER THROUGH THE MACHINE. 
01:37:51.004 --> 01:38:05.168
Interviewer: AND IN THE EARLY DAYS THE IMAGE OF THE MACHINE WAS VERY MUCH TIED UP WITH ITS SIZE, WASN'T IT? HOW WOULD YOU CHARACTERIZE THE DIFFERENT MYTHOLOGIES THAT HAVE BEEN FORMED ABOUT COMPUTERS OVER THE YEARS? BECAUSE THAT HAS CHANGED QUITE A LOT WITH...
01:38:05.168 --> 01:38:08.997
Nelson: Well there have been a number of myths of the computer. 
01:38:08.997 --> 01:38:28.615
Nelson: The first of course was the locomotive tended by acolytes in the air conditioned room that no one could get at, the...along with that the notion that it was a great scientific or technical monstrosity that only certain people could understand and had an intrinsically numerical quality. 
01:38:28.615 --> 01:38:36.408
Nelson: The new myths of the machine, well now they're tied up shall we say with the myths of the company that make them. 
01:38:36.408 --> 01:38:49.191
Nelson: And and so you have the IBM myth of the small machine, the Macintosh myth of the small machine and it's remarkable how IBM people for example, people who use IBM PCs or...PCs, pardon me. 
01:38:49.191 --> 01:39:08.399
Nelson: People who use PCs which were originally made by IBM and no longer are, that they think of themselves as practical people and quite remarkably I find that Macintosh people tend much more to be idealists and in fact the Macintosh seems to be the idealist computer around the world. 
01:39:08.399 --> 01:39:22.412
Nelson: I don't know if you can use this example but, I know a couple in San Francisco who have a so-called open relationship and he doesn't mind her sleeping with other men but he does mind her using a Macintosh.
01:39:22.412 --> 01:39:33.650
Interviewer: CURRENTLY WE HAVE LIKE A STAND ALONE VIEW OF THE COMPUTER AS A MACHINE ON THE DESK, AND CLEARLY AS IT GETS SMALLER AND MORE NETWORKED THAT MAY CHANGE AGAIN. 
01:39:33.650 --> 01:39:42.597
Interviewer: DO YOU EVER THINK WE'LL GET BEYOND THE MACHINE IDEA OF A COMPUTER AND MORE TO A MEDIUM RATHER LIKE PAPER AND STUFF LIKE THAT?
01:39:42.597 --> 01:39:46.875
Nelson: People still think that buying a computer ... 
01:39:46.875 --> 01:40:00.917
Nelson: People still think of the computer as a sort of commodity, and in fact people think of a telephone as a commodity even though it has a computer in it. 
01:40:00.917 --> 01:40:06.869
Nelson: So the object has an image that hides so much that's inside it. 
01:40:06.869 --> 01:40:24.724
Nelson: I hear of people sent to buy a computer for a company that has no computer and still being, treating it this is a commodity as though it's something you can buy off the shelf and make happen. 
01:40:24.724 --> 01:40:29.467
Nelson: And no I just think that's just going to continue. 
01:40:29.467 --> 01:40:36.348
Nelson: The psychology of buying a machine is so much with us, rather than the... 
01:40:36.348 --> 01:40:40.719
Nelson: psychology of buying into a system which is... 
01:40:40.719 --> 01:40:46.671
Nelson: what you're doing, you're buying into a system and way of life. 
01:40:46.671 --> 01:40:57.086
Nelson: It's like choosing to live in a condominium with a swimming pool for example rather than owning your own house. 
01:40:57.086 --> 01:41:04.247
Nelson: It's you're entering into an entire system, and yet people don't realize it. 
01:41:04.247 --> 01:41:08.060
Nelson: Now computer as medium is going to be... 
01:41:08.060 --> 01:41:13.081
Nelson: Computer as medium is going to be a new thing though. 
01:41:13.081 --> 01:41:25.357
Nelson: And again what we're going to call it isn't entirely clear, of course the term people, a lot of people are using now is multimedia. 
01:41:25.357 --> 01:41:35.400
Nelson: I very much prefer the...term hypermedia because that means responding media where you get to make choices. 
01:41:35.400 --> 01:42:31.941
Nelson: And the hypermedia machines of tomorrow...the hypermedia machines of tomorrow are going to be essentially computers really with transmission lines like any others but because the emphasis is going to be on exploring text and graphics and movies and simulations, there's going to be a new edge to it and maybe we need a new word -- I haven't thought of one really but in any case it will be essentially sitting down at the [MAKES SOUND] and being able to read, write, explore, add, create, change, and connect, making notations, making anthologies, making new interconnections, quoting things left and right. 
01:42:31.941 --> 01:42:37.242
Nelson: This will be a new environment wholly unlike any others. 
01:42:37.242 --> 01:42:55.376
Nelson: And of course it's the one that I've been trying to set up the kitchen for, the service facilities to deliver these materials, for all this time—over time, that's what we call the Xanadu Project.
01:42:55.376 --> 01:43:08.529
Interviewer: I MEAN IT IS AS YOU SAY VERY MUCH UP TO US, BECAUSE THIS MEDIUM IS A META-MEDIUM, IT CAN SIMULATE ALL OTHER MEDIA, CAN'T IT? THEREFORE...IT COULD GET SWALLOWED UP BY TELEVISION IF WE WANT IT TO, OR IT COULD SWALLOW UP EVERYTHING... 
01:43:08.529 --> 01:43:22.023
Interviewer: WHAT DO YOU THINK WILL HAPPEN? I MEAN, DO YOU THINK IF WE'RE LOOKING ON A HISTORICAL STAGE WHEN WE REGARD THINGS LIKE THE THE INVENTION OF WRITING, THE INVENTION OF PRINTING AS SIGNIFICANT...WE'RE TALKING ABOUT SOMETHING RATHER LIKE THAT?
01:43:22.023 --> 01:43:26.895
Nelson: First of all I really like meta-medium which I'd never heard before. 
01:43:26.895 --> 01:43:41.723
Nelson: Yeah, well the computer is in this sense going to be a meta-medium combining and allowing the delivery of all sorts of existing media but in new ways, in an utterly new theater as it were, theater of the mind. 
01:43:41.723 --> 01:43:58.458
Nelson: And I think this is going to have an immense impact on the way we think, the way we do everything and like every fad that catches on big, it's impossible to predict when it will start or how it will start but we know that it will start. 
01:43:58.458 --> 01:44:05.095
Nelson: And we don't quite know what machines it will be delivering it to and what they'll look like. 
01:44:05.095 --> 01:44:10.885
Nelson: They'll probably be high definition TV consoles but we're not quite sure of that. 
01:44:10.885 --> 01:44:28.891
Nelson: It's going to be a departure though from media as we, as we know them now, and especially from television because television is built around, television and radio are built around the time slot, and the time slot is intrinsically inimical to exploration. 
01:44:28.891 --> 01:44:35.529
Nelson: And the school is another institution built around the time slot and inimical to exploration. 
01:44:35.529 --> 01:44:48.662
Nelson: And I look forward to seeing both of these take on new positions in our lives, because I think the addiction to television and leaving the set on has done bad things to us in many ways. 
01:44:48.662 --> 01:44:53.464
Nelson: I don't know where my television set is right now...oh there it is. 
01:44:53.464 --> 01:45:02.219
Nelson: But but I haven't turned on a television set more than...I haven't successfully turned on a television set in the last year.
01:45:02.220 --> 01:45:05.998
Interviewer: I'VE GOT TO ASK YOU A COUPLE OF QUICK QUESTIONS FROM LAST TIME... 
01:45:05.998 --> 01:45:21.743
Interviewer: WHEN YOU WERE DESCRIBING BACK IN THE SEVENTIES, TWO COMPUTER FAIRS AND I'D JUST LIKE YOU TO REPEAT THE ANSWER AND YOUR RECOLLECTIONS OF THEM, THE FIRST WAS THE ATLANTIC CITY COMPUTER FAIR...AND THE NEXT WOULD BE THE WEST COAT COMPUTER FAIR AND THE DIFFERENCES BETWEEN THEM...
01:45:21.743 --> 01:45:23.935
Nelson: Well, memory fades. 
01:45:23.935 --> 01:45:29.085
Nelson: I guess the, hmmm, the early computer fairs... 
01:45:29.085 --> 01:45:42.672
Nelson: ah, yes -- "Yes, he said in his rocking chair." -- Well the first personal computer fair I guess was in Philadelphia in '76.
01:45:42.672 --> 01:45:44.341
Interviewer: ATLANTIC CITY.
01:45:44.341 --> 01:45:47.341
Nelson: Was it Atlantic City?
01:45:47.341 --> 01:45:48.968
Interviewer: I THINK SO, YEAH. 
01:45:48.968 --> 01:45:51.410
Interviewer: YES, IT WAS ATLANTIC CITY. 
01:45:51.410 --> 01:45:53.581
Interviewer: WELL WHEREEVER IT WAS...
01:45:47.341 --> 01:45:47.768
Nelson: Well, the one I remember, the first personal computer fair that I remember was in Philadelphia in 1976. 
01:45:47.768 --> 01:45:47.936
Nelson: Well...might it have been Atlantic City. 
01:45:47.936 --> 01:45:49.251
Nelson: All I remember is going, is driving through rush hour traffic, I had six or seven people in the car with me and we'd been delayed and so we hit rush hour traffic and according to some of those people in the car we drove on the walls and ceilings of the tunnels in order to get through that traffic...we were determined. 
01:45:49.251 --> 01:45:50.093
Nelson: And in any case, wherever it was -- it might have been Atlantic City -- it was it was special because it was a lot of people coming together for the first time who suddenly realized they were an industry. 
01:45:50.093 --> 01:45:50.516
Nelson: I was an entrepreneur in something called the itty bitty machine company in Chicago, a computer store. 
01:45:50.516 --> 01:45:51.190
Nelson: And I had several partners...we never actually had a falling out it's just that it was run into the ground, each thinking it was run into the ground by the others. 
01:45:51.190 --> 01:45:51.773
Nelson: And although we had, we made some nice posters, but we exhibited at that company—at that conference and I sold my book, "Computer Lib" there. 
01:45:51.773 --> 01:45:51.978
Nelson: Allegedly, Jobs and Woz were showing their Apple. 
01:45:51.978 --> 01:45:52.697
Nelson: That's right I remember several times people saying oh you should go see the, that Apple, or those fellas Jobs and Woz...Wozniak want you to come see their Apple II computer. 
01:45:52.697 --> 01:45:53.461
Nelson: I said does it have lower case and they said no...it'll never fly, where text handling is going to be the way of the future, without lower case no personal computer is going to make it. 
01:45:53.461 --> 01:45:53.580
Nelson: So I was wrong on that one...
01:47:32.912 --> 01:47:40.930
Interviewer: SO THIS WAS A REASONABLY SMALL SET-UP JUST FOR ENTHUSIASTS, I MEAN THIS WAS AN EMERGING INDUSTRY THAT HADN'T REALLY GOT VERY FAR, WOULD YOU AGREE?
01:47:40.930 --> 01:47:41.326
Nelson: Yeah. 
01:47:41.326 --> 01:47:46.210
Nelson: I gave a talk there that I had really done myself proud in organizing it. 
01:47:46.210 --> 01:48:07.796
Nelson: Only about 15 people came and I was supposed to limit my remarks to a certain length of time and when...I ran over, they did a very rude thing, they opened the curtains so the cocktail party drowned me out but everyone in the audience wanted me to continued so I continued to the end and got a standing ovation from 15 people. 
01:48:07.796 --> 01:48:22.912
Nelson: It turned out that I now know all these people well, it was a hardcore of kindred spirits and but it was a...it was kind of a monumental speech...at that time where I was...denouncing IBM and saying we would take over the world. 
01:48:22.912 --> 01:48:26.608
Nelson: We have, we still have tapes but not of the ending part.
01:48:26.609 --> 01:48:30.744
Interviewer: NOW A YEAR LATER ON THE WEST COAST THINGS HAD MOVED ON QUITE A LOT —
01:48:30.744 --> 01:48:39.730
Nelson: By the way one computer...one early computer conference I'd like to mention was the Altair computer conference which was really the first of them. 
01:48:39.730 --> 01:48:50.793
Nelson: It was called the World Altair Computer Conference and we all flew to Albuquerque, New Mexico where Altair, then the undisputed champion of the personal computer was holding court. 
01:48:50.793 --> 01:48:59.778
Nelson: David Bunnell was the organizer, he later went on to found PC Magazine I believe, and then PC World magazine and Macworld magazine, did very well. 
01:48:59.778 --> 01:49:05.829
Nelson: At the time he was just the young whippersnapper who put the conference together, or so I thought. 
01:49:05.829 --> 01:49:11.269
Nelson: But he did a good job and we all flew into Albuquerque and I remember it was remarkable. 
01:49:11.269 --> 01:49:18.176
Nelson: There were about, well several hundred people and I remember the evening session and making some sort of speech. 
01:49:18.176 --> 01:49:22.821
Nelson: Apparently I said things that shocked people but that was in the days of... 
01:49:22.821 --> 01:49:27.222
Nelson: I thought everybody was much more liberated than they turned out to be. 
01:49:27.222 --> 01:49:37.979
Nelson: And anyway the Altair Computer Conference was the first moment we all became conscious of each other and that had a verve that no other conference has ever had before or since.
01:49:37.979 --> 01:49:49.444
Interviewer: BUT DID YOU THINK IT WAS A SHORT MATTER OF TIME YOU WERE GOING TO DEMOLISH IBM, THAT IN FACT YOU WERE GOING TO START A REVOLUTION, DID IT FEEL LIKE THAT?
01:49:49.444 --> 01:49:55.683
Nelson: I was sure that there was going to be a revolution and it was all tied up with a lot of things. 
01:49:55.683 --> 01:50:03.027
Nelson: I, yes I thought the downfall of IBM was going to be part of it and I think in fact that is happening right now. 
01:50:03.027 --> 01:50:07.706
Nelson: IBM is on its knees and has a, has a lot further to fall in my opinion. 
01:50:07.706 --> 01:50:16.740
Nelson: And...you know...I no longer am eager to see this event but at the time that seemed to me a necessary step in the struggle for liberation. 
01:50:16.740 --> 01:50:47.805
Nelson: No, yes it was a revolution and there's no question but it was a revolution that turned middle class the way they all do you see and they've compared me to Trotsky, because in every revolution there's...there's one character that says "No, we haven't gone far enough, we've...we've left our principles behind!" and it was Danton in the French Revolution, and Thomas Paine in the American Revolution, and Trotsky in the Russian Revolution, and in the Computer Revolution, well...
01:50:47.805 --> 01:50:55.856
Interviewer: LOOKING BACK...YOU SAID IT WASN'T OVER YET. 
01:50:55.856 --> 01:51:05.372
Interviewer: HOW FAR HAVE WE COME, AND HOW FAR HAVE WE GOT TO GO?
01:51:05.372 --> 01:51:09.333
Nelson: Well of course it's going to...the computer revolution... 
01:51:09.333 --> 01:51:17.663
Nelson: The computer revolution is going to be an unending change, an onrushing torrent that sweeps the old aside in every field. 
01:51:17.663 --> 01:51:22.443
Nelson: It's a black hole that eats fields, you go in and you don't come out. 
01:51:22.443 --> 01:51:26.745
Nelson: But on the other side we missed the most fundamental problems. 
01:51:26.745 --> 01:51:58.907
Nelson: I believe that the file model, the way we handle files without any way of keeping their history...without any way of showing interconnection between them has left everyone drowning in stinky little files with short names that you can't understand and drawers, these desk drawers full of every kind of disk and you don't even know what's on them, and you don't have time to look and you can't find out what's on them without a heroic effort -- and this has got to change. 
01:51:58.907 --> 01:52:07.920
Nelson: And so this fundamental model of how we store information has been wrong from the very beginning and it's what I attacked in the... 
01:52:07.920 --> 01:52:10.037
Nelson: at the very beginning in 1960. 
01:52:10.037 --> 01:52:27.108
Nelson: So that's what's wrong and that's what's got to be fixed because we're drowning in information already and the spigot has just started to open because the torrent and avalanches of information we're going to have to keep organized is only beginning. 
01:52:27.108 --> 01:52:30.454
Nelson: At the National Supercomputer Center they have --
01:52:32.613 --> 01:52:35.051
Interviewer: OKAY, SO YOU WERE SAYING WE'RE DROWNING IN INFORMATION...
01:52:35.051 --> 01:52:35.515
Nelson: Right. 
01:52:35.515 --> 01:52:48.331
Nelson: We are now drowning in information, and the rate is going to increase from every source and the ability to understand this, to show it, to visualize it and to mark it so we can make bookmarks. 
01:52:48.331 --> 01:52:53.046
Nelson: I can make a mark on some piece of data and say this is such and such. 
01:52:53.046 --> 01:53:26.314
Nelson: Here's a here's a photograph sent back from Mars all these dots coming in on the radio from some Mars probe we sent and I said look at that formation you say "No, that's a statue of Elvis." We had a big headline recently that said Elvis Presley found on Mars and we can argue about this, we'd have to be able to be for all this data to enter into a controversy, into the stream of controversy, so that everyone can access it, everyone can mark it, annotate it and deal with it for their own purposes. 
01:53:26.314 --> 01:53:28.704
Nelson: But presently this is not possible. 
01:53:28.704 --> 01:53:38.930
Nelson: We have a Balkanized system where he's got that data, they've got that data there is not yet a common repository where all these things can be published. 
01:53:38.930 --> 01:53:43.113
Nelson: And I consider this the principle task that lies before us now.
01:53:43.113 --> 01:53:58.680
Interviewer: HOW WOULD YOU RATE -- FINAL QUESTION -- THE COMPUTER, IT'S FORTY YEARS OLD, WE HAVE GREAT DIFFICULTY THINKING ABOUT IT AND THINGS LIKE SOFTWARE AND SO FORTH, IT'S VERY HARD TO INTERPRET. 
01:53:58.680 --> 01:54:06.172
Interviewer: DO YOU THINK IN THE HISTORY OF HUMAN CULTURE THIS IS AN EXTREMELY SIGNIFICANT CHANGE? ... 
01:54:06.172 --> 01:54:13.247
Interviewer: HOW WOULD YOU GAUGE IT, TO GIVE US SOME IDEA? THIS ISN'T JUST ANOTHER MACHINE, IS IT?
01:54:13.247 --> 01:54:23.819
Nelson: This century has seen half a dozen extreme paradigm shifts caused by various technological invasion which became part of the culture. 
01:54:23.819 --> 01:54:40.070
Nelson: Radio, tele- -- well, the telegraph is last century -- then came the telephone, radio, movies, television, the nuclear bomb, the automobile, not in that order, and the birth control pill, and the computer. 
01:54:40.070 --> 01:54:50.089
Nelson: So they've many such extraordinary sweeping changes in the way we live our lives built around these extraordinary innovations. 
01:54:50.089 --> 01:54:51.351
Nelson: The computer... 
01:54:51.351 --> 01:54:58.846
Nelson: each of these innovations is a paradigm shift, because it's created a different way of living. 
01:54:58.846 --> 01:55:04.999
Nelson: The computer is a special paradigm shift because it has so many sub-churches. 
01:55:04.999 --> 01:55:13.203
Nelson: There are different denominations who cannot even speak to each other and cannot understand each other. 
01:55:13.203 --> 01:55:17.621
Nelson: Artificial intelligencers don't talk to the rest of us. 
01:55:17.621 --> 01:55:25.589
Nelson: People into mainframe computing are scarcely aware of, and deeply resent, the small computer people. 
01:55:25.589 --> 01:55:38.054
Nelson: People who use computers for databases are very different from and resent people who are into hyper-bases and hypermedia and hypertext, my particular church. 
01:55:38.054 --> 01:55:49.098
Nelson: People who are into interactive graphics insist that's the center of everything and can't understand why anyone would ever want a printout. 
01:55:49.098 --> 01:55:56.829
Nelson: So there are all of these different churches of computerdom and there are going to be more sects. 
01:55:56.829 --> 01:56:09.136
Nelson: The latest and hottest church is so-called cyberspace or virtual reality, where you put on a helmet and wander through artificial three dimensional worlds. 
01:56:09.136 --> 01:56:11.029
Nelson: I'm not of that church. 
01:56:11.029 --> 01:56:29.332
Nelson: It's been around for...Ivan Sutherland was doing that 25 years ago and I wondered why it hadn't caught on, it's wonderful but it doesn't change any of the fundamental issues such as the issue of a great repository we can all share. 
01:56:29.332 --> 01:56:37.931
Nelson: So, the computer world will continue to be an ever proliferating collection of sects rather like Los Angeles.