Of the demise of that great civilization I need not speak; that too is the province of another's expertise, the subject indeed of a dedicated Convention. But I will note that it was the Ancients themselves who created the crude progenitor of today's communication, which they called, as far as we can determine, the computer. They were unable to control the incredible power of complexity — in many ways they were only a little more sophisticated than those unknown creatures who painted strange animals on the rock walls of caves — and perhaps, like a wild beast brought into the house as a cub, it eventually turned on its masters and laid waste to the house. But that is mere speculation on my part — as I say, the province of another's expertise.

It is clear that the Ancients regarded the computer in many ways as merely an electronic book, and its purpose as primarily that of data storage. And of course it was extremely effective at that. But as one ancient text has it, that is like saying that a tree is an extremely effective means of storing water. We do not regard this as the point of the tree.

(Hold for laughter, if any.)

But it was during those brilliant years so heartbreakingly close to the end that a few bold souls ventured into what they called hyper-text (over-text, or perhaps going-beyond-text), and were almost immediately dazzled by its potential, if I may borrow once more from the Ancients' catalogue of idioms. There survive a handful of these ante-cataclysmic hyper-texts, and they are nearly impenetrable for the most part, comprised as they are of colloquial prose and personal imagery — fragmented, recombinant, allusive in the extreme, but to causes and events and ideas that have long been lost.

What is interesting about these textual concatenations, of course, is their interactivity, or rather the spirit behind this interactivity: authors took it as a given that readers would wish to find their own way through a maze of what were called "writing spaces" or "lexia" and other things, each a little packet of information (mostly words, but occasionally incorporating images and even sounds) linked laboriously to each other in a pattern usually determined by the author, but which apparently could be altered by a reader's choices.]