Brenda Laurel, also in her mid-thirties, is an artist whose medium exists at the boundary of Kay's and Barr's and Engelbart's specialties. Her goal is to design new methods of play, learning, and artistic expression into computer-based technologies. Like Barr, she believes that the applications of her research point toward more extensive social effects than just another success in the software market.

Ted Nelson is a dropout, gadfly, and self-proclaimed genius who self-published Computer Lib, the best-selling underground manifesto of the microcomputer revolution. His dream of a new kind of publishing medium and continuously updated world-library threatens to become the world's longest software project. He's wild and woolly, imaginative and hyperactive, has problems holding jobs and getting along with colleagues, and was the secret inspiration to all those sub-teenage kids who lashed together homebrew computers or homemade programs a few years back and are now the ruling moguls of the microcomputer industry.

Brenda wants to use an expert system that knows what playwrights, composers, librarians, animators, artists, and dramatic critics know, to create a world of sights and sounds in which people can learn about flying a spaceship or surviving in the desert or being a blue whale by experiencing space-desert-whale simulated microworlds in person.