What is a parenthesis but an idea trying to escape? What is a footnote but an idea that jumped off the cliff?

Paper enforces single sequence and there's no room for digression. It imposes a particular kind of order in the very nature of the structure. When I saw the computer I said, "at last we can escape from the prison of paper!" [...] Contrarily, what did the other people do? They imitated paper.

[...] What do you want in electronic documents that is not possible on paper? Well, for one thing, parallelism. You want things [marginal notes, deep links, origins of content] on the side. [...] Consider the writing of history. What is history? It's many parallel streams of events which meet at certain points. So why not create them as parallel structures that makes it easier to write, easy to read. [...]

The techies have imitated the conventional media of the past [...] Why, when we could have movies that branch and branch and branch forever and keep track of them? This is a radical proposal for a completely new different system of media and representing each user as a simultaneous reader and writer, which is what we really are.