cervantes of hypertext

Ted Nelson is voicing what a few people have known for a while, from the technical side -- that the intersection of communication and computer technologies will create a new communication medium with great possibilities. But he notes that the art of showing us those possibilities might belong to a different breed of thinker, people with different kinds of motivations and skills than the people who invented the technology. After Gutenberg came Cervantes. After movable type came novels. As Alan Kay pointed out, literature was the software of the era. The Cervantes of Hypertext might be learning to read right about now.

www.rheingold.com/texts/tft/14.html
Tools For Thought: Xanadu, Network Culture, and Beyond

adding this on 5/2/2006 actually, bcs neglected to quote before, so it wasn't here for me to search out.
(happily blogger lets me backdate even the year. now if I cld just get those lil pencils to show up, I cld edit old posts at this computer..)