Ted Nelson's hatred of conventional structure made him difficult to educate. Bored and disgusted by school, he once plotted to stab his seventh-grade teacher with a sharpened screwdriver, but lost his nerve at the last minute and instead walked out of the classroom, never to return. On his long walk home, he came up with the four maxims that have guided his life: most people are fools, most authority is malignant, God does not exist, and everything is wrong.

Once upon a time, in the great dark ages long ago, let's say 1945 - fifty-two years ago, computers had just been invented well they'd been invented by lots of people, Babbage, Turing, Zuse, Atanasoff, Eckert and Mauchly, all these people had come up with essentially the same idea. Zuse is of special interest in that he tried to sell digital computers in Nazi Germany. Fortunately, the Nazis didn't know what they could have had.

Anyhow, at the end of the war, there they were with computers and the excitement of a new burgeoning realm of possibility. And they started accumulating data. Data for different projects. And this data was kept in files - Now, what is a file? It's a lump. It's a lump... From the outside, a uniform, indistinguishable lump. The interior is not addressable.

OK, first they had files, then they had filenames. Gee it makes sense to give this file a name. Then they said 'Where shall we put all these files? Well, why don't we make a tape? and put the files one by one on the tape, and then we'll write down the names on a piece of paper.'

And then somebody had a bright idea and said "Wait, why don't we put the filenames in a separate file?' Thus was born the hierarchical directory, because it was recursive and it scaled. And since then, the tradition of lump files with names and hierarchical directories has been the driving structure of the entire computer field. So that in documents, one document is one file. Mmm. Metadata - now what's that? Well, metadata began with filenames. What's metadata? It's what isn't in the lump. So now there are all kinds of committees trying to decide how many angels can dance on the head of a file, what is to be metadata of this kind, that kind, the other kind, all of it because of the lump file structure and tradition.

All of this was frozen by Unix when, in 1970, the inode table the saying is that in Unix everything is a file actually in Unix everything is an inode, meaning an entry in this table, which has an item with a name and then a pathname. And the entire structure is based on rapid rearrangement of these elements as their pathnames change. And so preoccupation with file structures where they go in hierarchies and mapping everything to this model of lumps and names and metadata and files has been the entire driving structure of the entire computer field. The industry, the 'computer science' as it's called, whatever. So... finally, the tradition of one document per file.

Xerox PARC - Xerox Palo Alto Research Centre [...] created the modern world, they created the so-called modern GUI or Graphical User Interface. That's a very inappropriate name, [...] because you can have many other different kinds of graphics, so let's call it the PUI - the PARC User Interface. Because it's EXACTLY the same on Windows and Macintosh and Linux. If you think the Macintosh is different from Windows, you are trapped in the paradigm, unable to see the truth! All of it uses the same structure.

Now, What is the alternative? Well, let's finish about the PUI. So, the PUI then took the paradigm of lump files and names, and put candy on it. So now you have a desktop where we can place the lump files, or the directories, and see them. Oh, the directories are now called 'folders'. Big difference. Then we had the wastebasket, what was the wastebasket? A buffer for lump files that you weren't sure you were going to delete. In other words, you can't review particular parts of changes that you might have wanted to make, all you can decide is 'Yes' or 'No' - kill the whole file. The so-called clipboard, I don't want to even get into that monstrosity. And finally... Applications. What is an application? An application is a type of lump file and the program that manipulates it. Segregated from other forms of documents.

All of this, the PUI is the mask for the operating system. What is the operating system? A system for moving lump files and directories around, renaming them and turning on various programs with specific lump files as data. So, one paradigm. Now, we have the paradigm of one document per file. What does that mean? Along comes the World Wide Web. Is that radical? Hardly. What's it doing? It is a lump file, that means all the links are inside it, the links point to hierarchical directories outside, not only do they point to hierarchical directories outside, it's hierarchically structured inside as well. So hierarchy has been imposed on the content and on the world, and on the universe. And all of this is simply the rolling on, the snowballing of this lump file tradition.

What is the alternative? Throw away the lumps, or rather, create a new universe of small portions, which are addressable and which can be connected simultaneously in many different ways. We need addressable tiny pieces, we need changes to be addressable, we need to file the changes to a document, so they can be run forward and backward. It is time to re-examine the entire computer world. The computer world is not yet finished.