I had read about that book. The sheer linear nature of reading the Brittanica makes my teeth hurt. I really wouldn't be able to do it. It is only in digression that we find knowledge.

I really am so grateful I lived to see the internet. Hyperlinking was a computer concept that was so intuitiven to me it was deja vu when I first encountered it. It made not only perfect sense but was the next logical step after I had completely absorbed the word processor into my writing process. I had fantisized both the analog nature of wp writing and the random-access nature of information retrieval with hyper-linking long before I'd heard of either one. When I started using Applewriter the first thing I did was macro a whole bunch of ways to jump to other documents or other parts of the document I was working on.

I remember when hyperlinking was first popularized back about 1984 ( still on character screens ) buying a program called Hyperpad or something ( remember Framework from Ashton Tate ?) and showing it to someone and their saying 'Why would you want to do that?' and realizing that there were a whole lot of folks whose thinking was so linear it really *didn't* make sense to want to do that.


>>I was history major because of attention deficit disorder. I have always found that some of the most interesting things I know I found on my way to looking up something else.
>
>I'm reminded of one of the more fun books I've read recently (though it was sort of the opposite of ADD).
>
>The Know-It-All: One Man's Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World
>http://www.amazon.com/Know-All-Humble-Become-Smartest/dp/B000OV170C/ref=pd_bbs_sr_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1204991536&sr=8-2
>
>It's about a guy who decided to read the whole Brittanica.
>
>Tamar