Douglas Engelbart gave me the famous demo before the public saw it. [...] he then demonstrated uh hypertext, outline, and many other things, except what you didn't know, is that while he was, he had the mouse, which he which is most famous for, he had the mouse as his pointer, but while he was pointed on the screen he was typing with his left hand.

So I had to fix that. And at in 1967, commuting to Brown University at my own expense and very badly treated, I managed to to create today's link that you don't have to type anything to click.

Engelbart is Norwegian for angels beard. So Norwegian angels have beards

First thing Douglas Engelbart would do every morning was milk the cow.

I just heard what you said uh about Doug and whether you feel that Doug might have been a little naive. And so the rest of the context when I say a mess, I don't want to insult the people who engineered the internet protocols because that is sound engineering. Fabulous. Yet they got their work done right. Um we can't say the same thing about the web. It was not engineered. fundamentally what you've spoken about and what you just said today, we got the addressing part of it right, URLs, universal addressing, but the higher you go up in the stack from that uh the messier it gets. And um that's where we are from an engineering point of view.

Nelson's law about movie editing: If you have n minutes of filming, it will take you n squared minutes to edit it, at least.

When I was learning to write in my teens it seemed to me that paper was a prison four walls right and the ideas were constantly trying to escape what is a parenthesis but an idea trying to escape what is a footnote but an idea that tried that jumped off the liff because paper enforces single sequence and there's no room for degression it imposes a particular kind of order in the very nature of the structure

I got a scholarship to Harvard, surprisingly, and I took a computer course.

And they had been lying.

They were lying about what computers were. They weren't for arithmetic or science. They were for anything. They were all-purpose machines and you could put screens on them. [...] And I said, "Okay, that's it. That's it. the interactive screen will be the new home of the human race and nobody could understand what I was saying. I said it over and over and I tried to figure out how to make screens available.

Douglas Engelbart had the notion that he could make people agree, that he would create tools that would bring about agreement. What a wonderful idea.

What is history? it's many parallel streams of events which meet at certain points, so why not create them as parallel structures that makes it easier to write easier?

I was trying to figure out how to make computers available to the people. And I chose the name Xanadu because it came from a famous poem, the part of which was lost. Someone was writing down the poem and there was a knock at the door and the rest of the poem was forgotten. So I wanted to create Xanadu as the magic place of literary memory where nothing is forgotten.