Like the hyperlinked texts of Engelbart's system, the Whole Earth Catalog presented its readers with a system of connections. In the Catalog, no text stood apart from every other; each was part of an informational or social system, and each offered a doorway through which the reader could enter one of those systems.

Joseph Licklider in 1960 over de computer: The hope is that, in not too many years, human brains and computing machines will be coupled together very tightly, and that the resulting partnership will think as no human brain has ever thought and process data in a way not approached by the information-handling machines we know today."

As Stewart Brand pointed out, in what would soon become a famous formulation, information-based products embodied an economic paradox. "On the one hand," he said, "information wants to be expensive, because it's so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be fr

"thinking is a type of computation, DNA is software, evolution is an algorithmic process." Soon enough, he argued, human beings would begin to imagine all of biology as an instantiation of computer logic.