>Its so archaic to see terms like "the computer" thrown around. The term is meaningless today as it was back then. Why was it meaningless back then? In Nelson'

>Its so archaic to see terms like "the computer" thrown around. The term is meaningless today as it was back then. Why was it meaningless back then? In Nelson's earliest writings the term "computer" is used mostly to mean big iron with a text UI delivered via a teletype. I think most of his colleagues at the time shared this definition, making it at least meaningful through consensus. Regardless of that, though, if you think it's meaningless now keep in mind that Nelson uses the word "technology" as the main object of his criticism and offers "the computer" as an example. >I hate this catch-all term that's just a strawman for critics to bash nerds with. If "the computer" is awful, then it might have more to do with management and the business owning class's inability to leverage all these amazing technologies into a product the end user is comfortable with One of the points Nelson makes in his recent "contrarian computer history" book [1] is that the fate of the computer was sealed before the management even realized just how big of a deal it was. In fact, I think it's fair to say that early on most research fields were shaped more by the participants in those fields than by their non-technical superiors. You could argue that he makes this point precisely because we in the field tend to blame the management to easily for long-standing design decisions. This brings me to why I dislike his use of the word "tekkie": it promotes a view of an ivory tower critic bashing nerds when in fact the critic in question is one of the nerds that made computing (or at least hypertext and "hypermedia") happen. He, however, happens to disagrees with most others, with a prominent exception being Douglas Engelbart. >This is like Nelson pissing on the internal combustion engine and calling every engineer in Detroit, Seoul, and Tokyo a dimwitted anti-social jerk because his 1986 Datsun was a piece of crap. You can exaggerate it both ways. You could say that this is like someone who saw the birth of "the car" and realized that every car on the market had inferior lever-based controls in spite of his arguing for a steering wheel for decades. [1] See http://geeks-bearing-gifts.com/gbgContents.html http://geeks-bearing-gifts.com/gbgContents.html for summary.