I’m re-reading a book by Ted Nelson, the guy who created the notion of hypertext back in 67, and fully documented it. You can read about his creation, called Xanadu, on Wikipedia. His new book is more of a rant about the computer industry. It’s a telling book. First for the oddities of the book. It’s self-published via Lulu Press. It’s full of typographical and grammatical errors. It seems to have been written as one long diatribe, in historic form, about how we got into the predicament we’re currently in. And he numbers his chapters from the beginning to end using Unix as the central epoch thereby requiring the pre-Unix history to be provided in chapters denoted by a negative number. Unique, to say the least. Each chapter is short, a few pages at most, and full of personal opinion and historical detail. In a way, the book is partially biographical, at least in terms of his life and opinions and dealings with computers and the computer industry. You can quite literally pick any chapter and find nuggets. One of my favourite chapters is the one on databases, Chapter -20 (yes, minus 20). He goes on about the desire of