The funny thing is that early on in this interview the host tells Nelson that he's the only one saying anything about using computers to store and retrieve text

The funny thing is that early on in this interview the host tells Nelson that he's the only one saying anything about using computers to store and retrieve text. But that's simply not true, certainly not in 1979. For example, John McCarthy had been describing what largely came to be our digital literary future as early as 1970: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10370990 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10370990 Even within the contemporary environment a significant fraction of computer use was not 'number crunching', but the sorting, retrieval, and printing of essentially textual information. (i.e, records) Records are tiny documents, which to me makes this early portion where Ted accepts the point without argument a large missed opportunity to get the point across. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMYiktO0D64 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMYiktO0D64