His unfinished software project, Xanadu, grew out of his 1960 insight that paper would inevitably be replaced by computer screens. For several decades he continued to labor on the project — for a while at Autodesk, the engineering-oriented software publisher. More recently he has lived in Asia and Europe, where his work has generally been more deeply appreciated than in his native country.

Last year, he returned to the United States to finish his history. In “Geeks,” he settles some old scores and sets down his own version of the history of computing.

He wrote in a recent e-mail message: “I have long been alarmed by people’s sheeplike acceptance of the term ‘computer technology’ — it sounds so objective and inexorable — when most computer technology is really a bunch of ideas turned into conventions and packages.” His quarrel is with the dominance of “packages” like Microsoft Office and Windows, which he argues are the arbitrary result of business practices and not the inevitable result of technology evolution

I said almost exactly these words to someone in a similar context recently.