During my thesis research last year I had the pleasure of being able to read an original edition copy of Theodor Nelson's Computer Lib/Dream Machines, long out-of-print. Nelson is an academic and computer visionary who is generally credited with creating the term "hypertext" in 1965. While hypertext had been conceived of as early as the 1940s, Nelson was the first to construct it within the context of the emerging computer technologies of the 1960s and 70s as a new mode of publication.

The word "visionary" gets thrown around quite a bit when one talks about computers and the Internet: Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos ... all visionaries. And then you read this book, which originally appeared in the 1970s, based on ideas Nelson developed in the 1960s, and you discover what visionary really means. Dream Machines is a bona fide computer culture classic; it is shocking that such an influential and important book is out of print.