Customer Reviews

Computer Lib/Dream Machines

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I read this book back in the mid/late 70's, when I was attending university. My memories of it are somewhat uncertain, but it was one of the reasons I went into software development. The owner of it left soon after for Xerox PARC...

I need a copy for myself.

Theodor Nelson is an academic and computer visionary who is generally credited with creating the term "hypertext" in 1965. While hypertext had been conceived of as early as the 1940s, Nelson was the first to construct it within the context of the emerging computer technologies of the 1960s and 70s as a new mode of publication.

The word "visionary" gets thrown around quite a bit when one talks about computers and the Internet: Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos ... all visionaries. And then you read this book, which originally appeared in the 1970s, based on ideas Nelson developed in the 1960s, and you discover what visionary really means.

Dream Machines is a bona fide computer culture classic; it is shocking that such an influential and important book is out of print.

I was given a copy of this book in 1979, when I was just 17. I had been learning and using computers for 4 years at that point. This book was more interesting and more exciting than any other "popular" computer book that I have read, before or since. In one summary, the book was equivalent to: the top 5 BYTE magazine hobbyist articles of all time (1976-1988 period, the glory days), and the top 5 WIRED articles on emerging computer technologies of all time, and the top 5 Dr. Dobbs "Gee Whiz" articles for all time, all rolled into ONE BOOK.

Today, the material is dated. Most of the technologies he covered (Lisa, Plasma displays, Dynabook = laptops) have come true and have changed our lives. Back then, this was a revolutionary book, all about the latest revolutions in computer science.

I wish he'd write another.

I stumbled across this book in a discard bookshop in 1988 and have read it dozens of times since. In 1974 Nelson predicted the personal computer revolution and the demise of "big iron" IBM, demonstrated the computer as the ultimate entertainment machine, and designed the World Wide Web (only his version, Xanadu, was much, much better). The book itself is paper-based hypertext, with two mirrored sides and hundreds of "deeply intertwingled" articles. Nelson's vision is deep and his writing is by turns poetic, caustic, bitchy and glorious. The shame: Nelson has yet to realize his vision (see www.xanadu.net for evidence) and this essential book is now virtually impossible to find. I'm keeping my copy chained to my desk.