============ Introduction ============ Computers are supposed to be "information technology," to help you to keep your information organized. But we still have no good **tools to** help us **remember** our tasks, ideas and obligations; no tools to organize what we know about a thing, so that we can **understand** it better; no tools to **structure our thoughts**; no tools, when grappling with our problems today, to remind us of the solutions of yesteryear. We need a computer that helps us keep track of addresses, appointments, birthdays, budgets, employees, phone calls, courses we have taken, marks we got, thoughts, ideas, types of poems, types of plants, classes in a program and structures in a plot. Instead of being centered around irrelevant computery abstractions like "files" and "directories," such a system should center around the things we care about, the people, appointments, and so on. We propose a system in which these *items* (`Nelson 2000`_) are visible things that can be related to each other; we propose, in technical terms, a hypermedia system in which items are first-class objects. .. figure:: example1.gen.png :scale: 50 Figure 1: XXX. `Full image.`__ __ full-example1.gen.png .. _Nelson 2000: http://www.xanadu.com.au/mail/zzdev/msg02237.html