16 Jul
2023
16 Jul
'23
11:43 a.m.
On Sun, 16 Jul 2023, Steve Lewis via cctalk wrote:
more about Don and also Ted Nelson, author of Computer
Lib. And speaking
of Ted, I wish I could grasp/understand Project Xanadu better. My only
explanation is that our typical/classical approach to "file management" has
borrowed all the concepts of the physical world -- a desktop, a cabinet
with drawers, containing folders and files. But in cyberspace there was no
real reason to follow that model, and we could have had a better approach
to linking information (in some more bi-directional fashion). I don't know
if that comes close to Xanadu's ideals, but that's my gist understanding.
Our spoken languages I think sometimes make it difficult to convey novel
ideas sometimes.
It takes some work to follow Ted's writings.
It might help a little to read Vannevar Bush's "As We May Think".
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-may-think/303881/
https://www.w3.org/History/1945/vbush/vbush.shtml
Bush didn't like, nor fully understand the concept of hierarchicaal
organization of information. Instead, he was into a more conversational
sequential model, where threads would take off on tangents.
OB_past-futures (The obligatory predictions of what will be to come):
"microfilm replica. The Encyclopoedia Britannica could be reduced to the
volume of a matchbox. . . . The material for the microfilm Britannica
would cost a nickel, and it could be mailed anywhere for a cent."
[Every new storage medium uses Emcyclopedia Britannica, and/or a mythical
version of Library Of Congess that actually stores every published work.
At a party at Comdex, a few decades back, a [possibly inebriated] engineer
working for EB said, "It'll never happen. We are not in the information
business; we are in the leather bookbinding usiness"
Many people reading "As We May Think" get the impression that Bush implied
that he had built it. He had not, it was purely speculative. Several
aspects were not practical with the current technology, such as that flash
tubes of the time were NOT fast enough to freeze [for reading] a streaming
microfilm.
Bush was known for not always crediting those whose work he built on.
Buckland documented the work of Emanuel Goldberg, who was an earlier
creator of a microfilm selector (recording a few bits on the edge of the
film, to permit machine readable recognition of frames), particularly in
the context of Bush's work.
https://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~buckland/goldbush.html
The lack of credit raises some questions of academic integrity.
In contrast, Ted credited Bush, and Tim Berners-Lee credited Ted and Bush.
But, even with the background of Bush's concepts, Ted's writings require
dedicated work to understand.
However, "Hyperland", a 1990 [pre-WWW] BBC documentary about the future of
the internet, which he co-authored with Douglas Adams, and starring Tom
Baker, is completely watchable. (although no really good prints of it are
extant)
https://archive.org/details/DouglasAdams-Hyperland
If you want subtitles/captions, 5 years ago, I created an .SRT (camptions file) of it!
.SRT file: (view with an ASCII plain-text text editor, such as Notepad)
http://www.xenosoft.com/HyperlandCAPS_En_US_0_77.srt
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B4hCJm9ZEADCblVSVlBxdmZyREU/view?usp=drive…
(400MB video with subtitles burned in)
--
Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin(a)xenosoft.com