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going global

Different people had tackled different aspects of the social implications of hypertext. For Ted, hypertext was the opposite of copyright. The whole idea of Xanadu was driven by his feeling that anybody should be able to publish information, and if someone wanted to use that information, the creator ought to be automatically recompensed. One of the reasons Xanadu never took off was Ted's insistence on a pricing mechanism, and the difficulty of creating one that was consistent across the whole world. In theory this would be possible on the Web with certain extensions, and a system of "micropayments"—small debentures against a person's bank account—would allow automatic payments in very small quantities. I was not keen on the idea of having only one business model for paying for information. But I was keen on meeting Ted.

We had corresponded only a few times via e-mail, and the fledgling relationship we had was a strange one for me at least, because for a long time I owed Ted money. I had first heard of Ted in 1988 when reading about hypertext. His main book at the time was Literary Machines, published by the Mindful Press, which Ted operated as a one-man publishing house. Some time later I got around to sending him an order for the book with a check written out in U.S. dollars drawn on my Swiss bank account. Swiss checks were very international, with a space for the amount and a space for the currency type, but I didn't realize American banks didn't accept them. He sent the book, but I didn't succeed in paying, since he didn't take credit cards and I didn't have U.S. checks.

And so it had stayed. I called him up from PARC and found that he lived on a houseboat in Sausalito, across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco. It was the place closest to where things were happening that was sufficiently eccentric for him to live. Xanadu had been picked up by Autodesk, and Ted had some dignitary position with the company. But the day I was scheduled to meet him for lunch was a sad one. That very morning