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21. Computer Lib

/Dream Machines

1974

301

;

21. 

[Introduction]

From

Computer Lib / Dream Machines

Computer Lib / Dream Machines is the most important book in the history of new media.

Nelson’s volume is often called the first personal computer book, probably because it arrived shortly

before the first personal computer kit (the Altair) and was later recognized to have predicted the

effects of its coming. This, however, was only one of the many visions, prescient and influential,

offered in the volume.

Computer Lib / Dream Machines is a Janus-like codex that joins two books back to back; in the

middle, the texts of the two bound-together books meet. The “Computer Lib” side, its cover featuring

a raised fist with a computer in the background, didn’t simply predict that personal computers were

coming, but effectively challenged the popular notion of what computers were for, at a fundamental

level. As Stewart Brand wrote in his foreword to the 1987 edition, Ted Nelson is “accurately depicted

as the Tom Paine of the personal-computer revolution. His 1974 tract, Computer Lib / Dream

Machines, had the same effect as Paine’s Common Sense—it captivated readers, informed them, and

set them debating and eventually marching, rallying around a common cause many of them hadn’t

realized was so worthy or even a cause before. . . . The enemy was Central Processing, in all its

commercial, philosophical, political, and socio-economic manifestations. Big Nurse.” Nelson’s book

raised the cry, “Down with Cybercrud!” He exhorted his readers to defy the computer priesthood,

and its then-leader IBM, and to never accept, “The computer doesn’t work that way” as an answer

again. “Computer Lib” was in writing what the Altair and Apple II became in engineering: an artifact

that destabilized the existing computer order, that brought about a conception of the computer as a

personal device.

The volume’s other side, “Dream Machines,” had even greater significance for new media’s

development. Nelson wrote in the “Dream Machines” introduction, “Feel free to begin here. The

other side is just if you want to know more about computers, which are changeable devices for

twiddling symbols. Otherwise, skip it.” He wrote this believing his most essential message was not

about computers, but about media and design. He believed the importance of computers lay not in

their capacity for calculation, but in the fact that they would enable new generations of media. In

the pages that followed, Nelson reported on some of the most important work in new media up to

that time, such as that of Doug Engelbart (

◊08, ◊16) and Ivan Sutherland (◊09), and set forth his

own unique twofold vision.

First, he argued that computer experiences were media to be designed, and that this design

should be both a creative process and undertaken with the audience (users) in mind. His most

stirring essay on the subject (“Fantics”) is reprinted here, along with a small selection of Nelson’s

own designs. These are founding documents for the field now called human-computer interaction.

They caused Nelson’s book to be passed around, borrowed, stolen, and made a totemic object in

early new media businesses. One former Apple Computer designer tells the story of having a copy

of CL/DM placed in her hand the first day she reported for work.

Second, Nelson proposed that these new, designed media experiences be placed in a radical, open

publishing network. A network that supported the reconfiguration, comparison, and

interconnection of his 1965 hypertext proposal (

◊11), in addition to complex version management

and powerful user interface conventions. In pages reprinted here, he envisions the resulting

explosion of knowledge radically altering the daily experiences of everyone from students to

scientists. This vision and the project to realize it—Xanadu—made Nelson the butt of jokes for 20

Mitch Kapor, Designer of

Lotus 1-2-3, Cofounder of

the Electronic Frontier

Foundation:

I spent a lot of the early

1970’s prowling around the

bookstores and newsstands

of Harvard Square. By day,

I was a very junior

computer programmer and

occasional teacher of

Transcendental Meditation.

I stumbled upon Computer

Lib on a nocturnal

excursion and was instantly

bewitched. Here was a man

who dreamed my dreams

before I did, who gave

voice to a radically

different concept of

computers as other than

giant calculating machines.

Computer Lib inspired me

as no other book has

before or since and

sustained me over the next

few years until I bought

my first Apple II. It

pointed me in the direction

of a career in the as-yet

then-uninvented field of

personal computers. For

which I am eternally

grateful.

◊

09

109

◊

08

93

◊

11

133

◊

16

231

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21. Computer Lib

/Dream Machines

the

NEWMEDIA

READER

302

years: he was called a crackpot (and worse) for his strong conviction that Xanadu’s fundamentals

represented the future of media and culture. The general belief was that there simply was not

demand for a public, hypertext-enabled publishing network. This belief was resisted, however, by

small groups around the world who created and worked with various types of hypertext-enabled

networks. Although we have not yet reached Xanadu, when one of these systems, the World Wide

Web, began to explode in popularity during the 1990s (

◊54), the voices of Nelson naysayers were

drowned forever in a flood of international hypertext publishing.

—NWF

Original Publication

Self-published, 1974. 2nd ed., Redmond, Washington: Tempus Books/Microsoft Press, 1987.

Dream Machines (2):

It matters because we live

in media, as fish live in

water. (Many people are

prisoners of the media,

many are manipulators, and

many want to use them to

communicate artistic

visions.)

But today, at this moment,

we can and must design

the media, design the

molecules of our new water,

and I believe the details of

this design matter very

deeply. They will be with us

for a very long time,

perhaps as long as man has

left; perhaps if they are as

good as they can be, man

may buy even more time—

or the open-ended future

most suppose remains. 

Further Reading

Nelson, Ted. “A Conceptual

Framework for Man-Machine

Everything.” 

Proceedings

AFIPS National Computer

Conference and Exposition

M21-M26, June 4–8, 1973,

New York. Montvale, N.J.:

AFIPS Press, 1973.

Nelson, Ted. “The Right Way

to Think about Software

Design.” The Art of Human-

Computer Interface Design,

235–243. Ed. Brenda Laurel.

Reading, Mass.: Addison-

Wesley. 1990.

Rheingold, Howard. Tools for

Thought: The People and

Ideas Behind the Next

Computer Revolution. New

York: Simon & Schuster,

1985; Cambridge: MIT Press,

2000.

◊

54

791

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