Other physicists and mathematicians at the turn of the century came close to arriving at what is currently known as spacetime. Einstein himself noted, that with so many people unraveling separate pieces of the puzzle, "the special theory of relativity, if we regard its development in retrospect, was ripe for discovery in 1905."

Had Nelson been able to delve into the technical reasons for which computer people found his plans for Xanadu unconvincing, he might have been too discouraged to continue. The kinds of programs he was talking about required enormous memory and processing power. Even today, the technology to implement a worldwide Xanadu network does not exist. Back in the '70s, when Nelson was still waging the first phase of his campaign, even simple word-processing programs required users to share time on large mainframe computers. The notion of a worldwide network of billions of quickly accessible and interlinked documents was absurd, and only Nelson's ignorance of advanced software permitted him to pursue this fantasy.

What is an "Algorithm of Thought"? You might be more familiar with the term Mental Model, and the two are closely related, but different things. Mental Models are descriptive, they describe the state or behavior of a phenomenon by way of analogy. You've probably heard something like "Startup X has reached critical mass in terms of users and is now growing like crazy"

By contrast, Dramatica theory and the associated software, both conceived in the 1990’s, present authors with a a fractal model of story that twists, turns, and rearranges itself based on story details the writer provides. Users can approach the model from any number of perspectives, entering information about characters, plot, or theme; the model adapts itself accordingly, narrowing down options until a single “storyform” emerges

Once integrated into my consciousness, this approach — noting information in context and seeking connections and relationships between disparate facts — insinuated itself into the way I see the world.