There was an evening, some years ago, when I found myself having drinks with Ted Nelson. For those of you who don’t know, Ted Nelson is the person who first came up with the idea of the hyperlink – the basis of the internet: The idea that you can simply click on a piece of text in a document, and you are instantly taken to another document, which may be stored anywhere in the world. Sure, it sounds obvious now, but until Ted Nelson came up with this beautiful and elegant concept, nobody had ever thought of such a thing.
As you might well imagine, I was in complete awe of him. Here I was, slowly getting drunk with one of the premiere gods of the information age. Of course, there are gods and there are gods. And let’s face it, after you’ve had enough to drink, the only god you worship is Bacchus. Which is how it happened that, at a particular moment in the evening, I turned to my hero and said to him “You know, as much as I am in awe of your contribution to society, I am more impressed by your mom.”
There are at least two things that are interesting about this moment. One is the fact that I actually knew who Ted Nelson’s mom was. The other is that he completely agreed with me, and that he graciously ceded the point.
To put it bluntly, to me Ted Nelson’s mom is the unsung hero of proto-feminism. Long before Gloria Steinem or Betty Friedan, Ted’s mom created a cultural image that threw all our most insidious antifeminist prejudices back into our collective American face.
And although she was awarded for her pains what may very well be our culture’s most coveted honor, the true meaning of what she conveyed was so far ahead of its time that it would be decades before anybody could begin to understand its true significance.
More on this tomorrow.