Geeks Bearing Gifts | Ted Nelson

Whether you love the computer world the way it is, or consider it a nightmare honkytonk prison, you'll giggle and rage at Ted Nelson's telling of computer history, its personalities and infights. Computer movies, music, 3D; the eternal fight between Jobs and Gates; the tangled stories of the Internet and the World Wide Web; all these and more are punchily told in brief chapters on many topics such as The Web Browser Salad, Voting Machines, Google, Web 2.0 and much more. These short stories make great reading - it's a book to dip in and out of. You'll find answers to such questions as # ""Why do alphabets have upper case, why not numbers?"" # ""Why does everything have to be hierarchical on computers? That's not how *my* projects are organized!"" ""Where did WYSIWYG come from?"" The answer will surprise you. Plus, you'll find out why the author, a well-known computer veteran, hopes it can all become much better. 

About the Author

Ted Nelson is an American pioneer of information technology, philosopher, and sociologist. He coined the terms hypertext and hypermedia. According to a 1997 Forbes profile, Nelson "sees himself as a literary romantic, like a Cyrano de Bergerac, or 'the Orson Welles of software'." Nelson founded Project Xanadu in 1960, with the goal of creating a computer network with a simple user interface. The effort is documented in the books Computer Lib / Dream Machines, The Home Computer Revolution, and Literary Machines.