I've been fascinated by the number of different ways people have interpreted Bush's piece. Several people have shown me things saying, "Here, this is a memex." "No, this is a memex." And it's always different.

Talking about Vannevar Bush's Memex article This has inspired many people. It inspired Doug Engelbart, who was on a Pacific island reading it in a library in the Philippines.

Devon Zuegel: How would you like to see Xanadu be adopted? Ted Nelson: By the smartest people first. Devon Zuegel: How are you going about finding those folks? Ted Nelson: I'm not looking for them.

So the micro pay walls we plan, it would say, "Here's a list of pieces to bring in. Now bring in this piece, which happens to be a paid piece." Because the person who's compiling this document doesn't have to pay. He or she has already seen it, but we're now including it in the list.

The user, upon fulfilling these portions, has the choice of paying for that piece or not getting it. So that piece is bought by that character. This seems to be extremely fair. Anyone is free to include anything from anywhere without negotiation. Anyone is free to buy it or not buy it if it's on the edit decision list which brings in the document. And so the permission doctrine for this is called trans copyright, meaning: "I hereby give permission for this content to be used in any new context provided its bought from my server" — which could imply the micro-pay wall.

Creative Commons is just a way that people can give up the hope of being paid in a polite and elegant form.

Doug's Great Demo was in December in 1968, so the 50th anniversary is coming up this year. Everything worked. They were running it on a small computer by today's standards — less computer than you have in your wrist watch. And yet, time sharing I think — I was told the maximum number that they could do was seven maybe four users at a time. But they showed all these things on the screen, and Doug was on his microphone from San Francisco directing the whole affair, which was being transmitted via truck up on the highway that could see both Stanford and San Francisco. And the projector they used at the Demo was an Eidophor projector — one of these insane things that had a metal surface covered with oil and an electron beam wrote the picture on this oil, which was then reflected by a bright light through the projector. Then a windshield wiper would restore the oil for the next frame. That was just how the audience saw it. So this incredible chain of implausible structures worked perfectly on that day.

And that was the height of Doug Engelbart's career. Because after that, he lost his funding, he lost his laboratory, and for the next 40 years, he was in the wilderness writing specs — and trying to get back again. His backer Bob Taylor betrayed him and hired away his best people for Xerox Parc. So Doug felt betrayed by the people who left him, and an AI guy named Bertram Rafael convinced Doug's boss that he deserved Doug's office instead.

So Doug lost his office, and eventually they sold the project to McDonnell Douglas, an aircraft company that didn't know what to do with it. What it needed was much more product development to make it something real, and nobody had the vision to go ahead with it except Doug — and he was essentially left in the dirt.

I've found out later how little people hear.

Now, Doug had this problem. Doug Engelbart had this problem but even worse because he would begin talking and then he would introduce a new term, and then he would start using it, and so by the fourth paragraph, he was combining terms that were new to you in ways you can't imagine.

Whereas I was trying to explain what — to me — were very simple concepts. But they were so unfamiliar that nobody got them. Even Tim Berners-Lee didn't understand it.

Transclusion means that part of one thing is included in another and brought from the original. [...] There are links and there are transclusions — it's a different method. A link is a specific object separate from the content. A transclusion is simply following the path from a part to its original context. [...] So it doesn't require a link. It's just: "Here's the transcluded part, and the edit decision list says where it comes from." The edit decision list can show you where it is on the original.