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Computers might not find the solutions to our problems, but they would be able to do the bulk of the legwork required, assisting our human minds in intuitively finding ways through the maze. The added excitement was that computers also could follow and analyze the tentative connective relationships that defined much of our society's workings, unveiling entirely new ways to see our world. A system able to do that would be a fantastic thing for managers, for social scientists, and, ultimately, for everyone.

Unbeknownst to me at that early stage in my thinking, several people had hit upon similar concepts, which were never implemented. Vannevar Bush, onetime dean of engineering at MIT, became head of the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development during World War II and oversaw development of the first atomic bomb. In a 1945 article in the Atlantic Monthly titled "As We May Think," he wrote about a photo-electromechanical machine called the Memex, which could, by a process of binary coding, photocells, and instant photography, make and follow cross-references among microfilm documents.

Ted Nelson, a professional visionary, wrote in 1965 of "Literary Machines," computers that would enable people to write and publish in a new, nonlinear format, which he called hypertext. Hypertext was "nonsequential" text, in which a reader was not constrained to read in any particular order, but could follow links and delve into the original document from a short quotation. Ted described a futuristic project, Xanadu, in which all the world's information could be published in hypertext. For example, if you were reading this book in hypertext, you would be able to follow a link from my reference to Xanadu to further details of that project. In Ted's vision, every quotation would have been a link back to its source, allowing original authors to be compensated by a very small amount each time the quotation was read. He had the dream of a utopian society in which all information could be shared among people who communicated as equals. He struggled for years to find funding for his project, but success eluded him.