Computers are strange things. They enabled a plain canvas that could do anything and most importantly do it without the limitations imposed by the laws of physics. You could make a typewriter, but then what kept you from obeying the laws of paper? You could put a video on it and do linking and make hypermedia. Someone else could compose music, but once you can do the basics of music with waves, what forces you to stick with sampling a piano and not make instruments of your own?

And so in the case of it, there are so many different pioneers with so many different ideas. Maestro Kay refers to Maestro McLuhan and wants to create a better medium. Maestro Nelson hates parentheses and side notes, wishing to spare them freedom. Maestro Victor wants to kill math and make the computer a literary medium available as electricity everywhere. Maestro Engelbart wished to augment the human intellect.

The problem, however, is that making a system denies others of their own systems. Not to mention that it only makes the MVPs remain. Web instead of Xanadu, Macintosh instead os SmallTalk, you name it…