I would call him a legend in electronics... On Sat, Jul 1, 2023 at 7:33 PM Jon Elson via cctalk <cctalk(a)classiccmp.org> wrote: -- End of line JOB TERMINATED -->> Okey Dokey, OK Boss

I am going throw out a Jim Butterfield too On Thu, Jul 6, 2023, 5:52 PM John Many Jars via cctalk < cctalk(a)classiccmp.org&gt; wrote:

Sad to hear about Don Lancaster. Things like this is what motivated me to make the "domesticating the computer" video, which briefly mentions the TV Typewriter - to honor these "living legends". I wish I could have fit in 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. -SL On Sat, Jul 8, 2023 at 10:08 PM Ethan Dicks via cctalk < cctalk(a)classiccmp.org&gt; wrote:

On Sun, 16 Jul 2023, Steve Lewis via cctalk wrote: 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