Hypertext. Nobody gets it…
From boingboing. This reminds me of the story told by Kary Mullis when he tried to explain PCR to people at a meeting. Nobody — including Nobel laureates — could see why he was excited.
To commemorate the 50th anniversary of the first publication of the word “hypertext,” Gigaom talks to Ted Nelson, who coined the term and then introduced it in a 1965 paper for the Association for Computing Machinery.
What kind of reaction did you get from others?
No one, absolutely no one that I met, could imagine interactive computer screens. Whereas I could see them with my eyes closed, practically touch them and make them respond. It was very sensual.
And all during the 1960s and 1970s I was trying to tell people what interactive screens would be like, in my writings and my talks. But no one got it.