A certain confusion may befall us when we praise pioneers, especially while they are still with us. This hazard was apparent to the troubadour and know-hit wonder Jonathan Coulton, when he wrote one of the great tunes of popular science, ‘Mandelbrot Set’:

The song was released in October 2004, giving it a nice run of six years before its lyrics were compromised by Benoît Mandelbrot's passing in 2010. Even thus betrayed to history, ‘Mandelbrot Set’ still marks the contrast between extraordinary and ordinary lives, dividing those who change the world, in ways tiny or otherwise, from those who sing about them or merely ruminate. The life of ideas, perhaps like ontogeny, works through sudden transformations and upheavals, apparent impasses punctuated by instant, lateral shift. Understanding is catastrophic. Genius finds ‘infinite complexity […] defined by simple rules’, as Coulton also sings, though any such simplicity depends crucially on the beholder. Cosmic rules may have gorgeous clarity to a mind like Mandelbrot's. For the rest of us, the complexities of the universe are more often bewildering. Nothing is more bewildering, of course, than genius.

How does one write the story of a computer system? To trace a technical history, one must first assume that there is a technical ‘object’ to trace – a system or an artefact that has changed over time. This technical artefact will constitute a series of artefacts, a lineage or a line. At a cursory level, technical ‘evolution’ seems obvious in the world around us; we can see it in the fact that such lineages exist, that technologies come in generations. Computers, for example, adapt and adopt characteristics over time, ‘one suppressing the other as it becomes obsolete’ (Guattari 1995, 40). But are we to understand this lineage from a sociological, an archaeological or a zoological perspective? And what is a technical artefact?

I need to address these questions here for two reasons. First, because it is impossible to write a technical history without defining how that history will be constructed, and second, because these questions also concerned Douglas Engelbart, one of the early pioneers whose work we investigate in this book. The relationship between human beings and their tools, and how those tools extend, augment or ‘boost’ our capacity as a species, is integral to the history of hypertext and the NLS system in particular.

Traditionally, history has ignored the material dimension of technical artefacts. Historians are interested in tracing cultural formations, personalities and institutions, and especially the social ‘constructions’ they erect around themselves. Technical artefacts don't have their own history; they are perceived as the products of culture.

Everything is deeply intertwingled. I have always loved that particular Nelsonism (and there are many to choose from); it has stuck with me for twenty years. In this book we have looked at several early, pre-Web attempts to represent intertwingularity, to represent the deep connections that criss-cross and interpenetrate human knowledge. They were built at different times and from different technical components; two of them (Memex and Xanadu) were never built at all. As a series of machines, they are a motley crew. With the exception of Storyspace, they are also obsolete – had Bruce Sterling continued his Dead Media Project beyond 2001, they would belong properly to that collection.

There are, however, hypertexts created in the '80s that are still read and edited today. George Landow's Victorian Web, originally created in Intermedia, then ported to Storyspace and the Web, is one of the oldest scholarly hypertexts. It is still used as course material in Victorian literary studies. Numerous hypertexts created in Storyspace, among them afternoon and Victory Garden, are still read, studied and argued about in critical literature. We have inherited more than just technical designs from the history of hypertext – we have inherited works of literature.

The '80s was also a period of great critical foment for hypertext theory. Theorists began enthusiastically exploring hypertext from a literary perspective in the late '80s, claiming that the interactive nature of hypertext invites us to reconfigure our conceptions of ‘text’, ‘narrative’ and ‘author’ in a fashion more suited to the nature of the medium (Landow 1992, also Landow and Delaney 1995).

Dr Douglas Engelbart is a softly spoken man. His voice is low yet persuasive, as though ‘his words have been attenuated by layers of meditation’, his friend Nilo Lindgren wrote in 1971 (cited in Rheingold 2000, 178). I struggled to hear him, being partially deaf myself, but that didn't matter; he has been describing the same vision in great detail to journalists, historians and engineers for over 60 years. The words change slightly in each interview, but the vision remains clear and sweeping, like a horizon line on a bright summer's day. Engelbart wants to improve the model of the human, to ‘boost our capacity to deal with complexity’ as a species (Engelbart 1999).

To get what he means by ‘boost our capacity’ as a species, we must first understand his philosophical framework. This is important for two reasons. Firstly, this framework profoundly influenced his own approach to invention in the '60s and '70s. Secondly, it represents a fascinating (and novel) theory of technical evolution, a topic we have already started to explore in this book.

Engelbart believes that human beings live within an existing technical and cultural system, an ‘augmentation’ system. We are born with a particular set of genetic capabilities, and then we build on these innate capabilities using tools, techniques, skills, language and technology. There is no ‘naked ape’; from the moment we are born we are always already augmented by language, tools and technologies.

This book would not have been possible without the cooperation of its subjects. Like technology historian Steve Shapin and sociologist Thierry Bardini, I write in the ‘confident conviction that I am less interesting than the subjects I write about’ (Shapin cited in Bardini 2000, xiv). I have had the great privilege of meeting many of the people you will read about in these pages – except for Vannevar Bush, who died in 1974 – the colourful anecdotes, magical visions and prescient ideas you will find here have come directly from them or from their work. At times I felt like a media studies bowerbird, procuring brightly coloured memories, sticky notes and cryptic computer manuals from various computing science professors, writers and visionaries across the globe. In that sense, this book may be read as a simple history book. There is no need to be self-reflexive or clever when presented with such a treasure trove; it is intrinsically interesting and needs no posthistorical garnish (I'll confine that to the preface). That said, I do not claim to present you with the final word on hypertext history; this is an edited selection, a woven structure of deeply interconnected stories contributed in large part by the people who lived them.

I have spent months, years in fact, arranging this collection; it was first assembled as a PhD thesis in 1999, before I had children and consequently when I had the luxury of time. Time to do things like roam around Brown University gathering documents and stories from Andries van Dam and the Hypertext Editing System (HES) team; time to rummage through the Vannevar Bush archives at the Library of Congress looking for interesting correspondence; time to interview Doug Engelbart and feel embarrassingly starstruck; and time to travel to Keio University in Japan to meet Ted Nelson.

Michael Joyce has kept a journal for many years. Before he begins to write, he inscribes the first page with an epigram: Still flowing. As anyone who has read Joyce's fictions or critical writing will attest, his work is replete with multiple voices and narrative trajectories, a babbling stream of textual overflow interrupted at regular intervals by playful, descriptive whorls and eddies. If there is a common thread to be drawn between his hyperfictions, his academic writing and his novels, then it is this polyglot dialogue, as Robert Coover terms it, a lyrical stream of consciousness. Joyce can tell a story. And he has told many stories: four books, 40 scholarly essays, and at last count (my count), a dozen fictions. What courses through this work is a gentle concern, or even fixation, with how stories are told – with ‘how we make meaning, as if a caress’ (Joyce 2004, 45). The metaphor of water is an appropriate one. Like Ted Nelson, who had his first epiphany about the nature of ideas and the connections between them as he trailed his hand in the water under his grandfather's boat, Joyce has long been concerned with how to represent a multiplicity of ideas and their swirling interrelationships, with how stories change over time. In the essay ‘What I Really Wanted to Do I Thought’, about the early development of Storyspace, Joyce writes: