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Many people think the World Wide Web was my idea.

I want to clear that up.

The web is a dumbed-down of my idea, but I believe I created the web accidentally by two mistakes I made.

We'll be getting to that.

Where to begin a history?

Benzo, where do you want to emphasize?

I'd begin the story of hypertext with the Rosetta Stone about 196 BC, the Talmud after 70 AD, the Hexapla of Origen, Third century.

These are all parallel documents, side by side, connected.

The kind of document not possible yet in today's electronic formats, nearly 2,000 years later.

Jump to around year 1450, Gutenberg reinvents movable type and prints Bible's great impact on religion.

Shortly thereafter, an enterprising Venetian named Aldus Minucius invents the personal book, which moves the Renaissance from palaces to middle-class homes.

Note 500 years to 1945.

Vannevar Bush, that's his name is pronounced Vannevar Bush, President Roosevelt's science advisor, writes an article predicting a machine he calls the Mimics, storing all the world's writings on microfilm, all of this.

He misunderestimated, he he, the words of another Bush, the words of another Bush.

He misunderestimated how many writings there would be, as did everyone.

Vannevar Bush proposed that scholars make trails to the world's knowledge, a new form of publication, each author connecting things and adding content of his own.

Technical aside, Bush's article also profiled transclusion.

1951, West Coast, Doug's epiphany.

Douglas Engelbart is one of the greatest men of all time, a warm-hearted, soft-spoken, and saintly guy who invented much of our modern world.

Doug's name, Engelbart, means "angels' beard," didn't know angels had beards, did you?

Well, Doug read Bush's article in 1945 when he was stationed overseas.

Then when he got his PhD in California in 1951, Doug Engelbart had a great vision.

That interactive computer displays would make possible a new form of collaboration vital for the urgent complex problems of humanity.

And it would be rather like the mimics.

It was all about connection, connections between documents, but also connections between people and the dynamics of collaboration.

Step by step, Doug went through the painful departmental politics and funding to build a team that would change the world.

That was his intention, and that is what he did.

Nowhere near what he hoped to do.

Cut to the East Coast.

In 1960, I, Ted Nilsen, took a computer course and it hit me.

The interactive computer screen will be the new home of humanity, the next great media revolution, and I want to be in it.

A lot of people can't understand how I could figure this out without being an engineer, but that's the reason I could figure it out.

The engineers didn't have a clue.

It took a media person.

I'd been an actor on stage and TV.

I'd published a little magazine.

I'd produced an LP.

I'd shot a half-hour movie.

I'd seen TV developing from the inside, watching what I went on in my father's control rooms at NBC and CBF, starting when I was 10.

So the technicalities and art of interaction would be the next frontier.

I didn't actually see an interactive screen for five years, but I didn't need to.

I was a movie maker.

I could feel the screen.

In my mind and heart, I saw it and touched it.

I conjured it and caressed it.

It responded wonderfully.

Many people still don't recognize interactive software as an art form.

Many techies treat the interactive screen as a kind of blackboard.

But artists know it as a lumbar.

Here was my new credo.

There would be millions of readers and writers all over the world with their own computers and screens, and they would be able to publish to each other without publishing companies in the middle.

This meant new forms of writing, it meant a whole new form of literature, it would replace paper.

Five years later, when I started publishing on the subject, I called it "hypertext.

" I had not yet heard of Engelbart.

Okay, technical part.

Here was my initial tactical design.

Whatever the user typed in would be immediately saved for safety on tape, I thought at the time.

Each new version would consist of pointers to what was already there on the tape and what you were adding as you continued to write.

The method would be safe and efficient and have other benefits which I gradually figured out.

How to do the links was a separate problem that would take 19 long years to figure out, but I feared that if I didn't design the documents of the future, the techies would screw it up.

Which I believe is exactly what has happened.

What I really wanted was to make movies, but I thought it was more important to be the new Gutenberg.

Little did I know that Gutenberg went bankrupt.

1964-ish, meanwhile in California, step-by-step Doug Engelbart builds his lab.

He gets sponsorship from Bob Taylor, the defense department, and assembles a team at Stanford Research to not stand for you.

In this project, Doug proceeds to invent multiple windows on a screen, screen sharing between collaborators, text editing on screen at the first word crossing, links between texts, and much more.

Technical point.

Doug's links weren't embedded.

The whole of Doug's vision was greater than these parts.

The augmentation of human intellect, especially through collaborative networks of people, constantly improving their networks with methods of collaboration.

Those innumerable parts that I just enumerated of Doug's system were just the hockey sticks for a much greater game of collaboration he hoped to create.

Okay, 1965, East Coast.

After four years of study in design, I submit papers to four conferences and everyone is accepted.

The biggie is the ACM National Conference in, of all places, Pittsburgh.

I think that most of the computer scientists in the world were in that room.

It was possible in those days, and most of them heard my paper.

It was very well received, and I could see that all my work was just it.

The only question confronting me was how to get leverage, convincing somebody that I was right so I could get machines and a team together.

But how could I make people believe I knew what I knew, let alone what I could do about it?

Then somebody came along that appeared to believe me and had the bucks to make it all happen.

A few days after my Pittsburgh talk, I got a call from a guy identifying himself as the Director of Information Processing Research for the Central Intelligence Agency.

He came to my house and asked how I'd like to be funded.

People asked me why would I take money from the CIA?

Hey, our country needs good intelligence, and I needed the money to do good things.

So I began writing proposals for the CIA, which went on for five years, till I gradually realized they were just stringing me along, as most prospective backers do.

1962.

1966.

Meanwhile in California, Douglas Engelbart invents what everybody credits him for.

A mouse.

Oops, it dropped it.

Is that it?

In the excitement it tried to escape.

Again Engelbart invents the mouse, which is a big improvement over the light pen.

But somehow the process of myth-making has dropped the more important stuff from his reputation one liner, leaving only in my dog's overall vision was and is so much more than that.

East Coast, 1967.

The Hess Project, HES.

I am asked to join a project at Brown University that will be a chance to "try out my hypertext ideas" at no sale, right?

It ends up costing me all my savings.

On the first day, I did not get along with the nasty guy who ran the project, but I am not a quitter.

I should have quit.

As I wrote in New Scientist magazine in 2006, I believe that humanity went down the wrong road with that project.

Dumbing down interactive documents through one-way jumps among paper simulations.

A great and fundamental loss to civilization.

The project was called HES, Hypertext Editing System, and it turned out the guy didn't really want hypertext.

What he wanted was a system to prepare paper documents for printing, what we now call word processing.

I consider this unworthy and entirely the wrong path.

You have to choose which will be.

Are you going have real electronic documents or are they going to simulate paper?

That project chose appearance over connection, dumbed down hypertext one-way jumps among paper simulations, and this would later become, alas, the structure of the World Wide Web.

1968, West Coast, by which time there was still no personal computer, Doug Engelbart's great demo at the Fall Joint Computer Conference, where he shows cooperative work by people at separate screens, amounts, hypertext links, collaboration over the phone while pointing at the same text on different screens, and much more.

At this point, computer screens were still considered exotic and crazy by most of the computer world.

Alas, this was Doug's high point, because politics and disagreements took over as his lab gradually fell apart.

Big skip to 1974.

Again on the west coast, Xerox Palo Alto Research Center in Xerox PARC starts hiring people away from Doug Engelbart and his lab collapsed.

I was at dinner with Doug a couple of years ago when he actually wept at the memory of how his people had deserted him and how Bob Taylor, his earlier supporter, betrayed him an