Then the reader had to take this linear structure and recompose his or her picture of the overall content, once again placed in this nonsequential structure. On the other hand, for a new publishing system of the future, and it seemed manifest to me in 1960 that we would be reading and writing on computer screens that were interactive and all this would be fed by a vast feeder network of digital digitalia around the world, since we're going to be publishing in a system of this kind, what would be the reward structure, what would be the document structure, and what would be the most beneficial extension of literature as we knew it. To me literature is the great ideal here, not some engineer's notion of information retrieval. The engineers seem to have the notion that you can take the documents that are written and dip them in some sort of technical acid and the facts will fall to the bottom and then these facts will roll into their appropriate slots. This is not so.
Writing is the way it is because every word generally has some kind of meaning.
It' s finding these meanings and making them most useful to me that seems the great problem. It sounds like the Xanadu system, many many years ago solved a lot of the really pertinent problems that are just only starting to surface in the World Wide Web today. But yet the WWW has managed to become by now the dominant hypertext paradigm. For the vast majority of people in the United States right now when you say hypertext they think of Netscape or Mosaic and that is their notion of hypertext. That's a good question, I'm still muddling with it.