1) "You can and must understand computers now!" Ted Nelson
2) “Most people are fools, most authority is malignant, and God does not exist.” Ted Nelson
Feeling 1) strongly today. From "Computer Lib/Dream Machines" 1974
Liking the middle clause of 2)
#tednelson
I contend that the purpose of computers is human freedom.
-- Ted Nelson
Today I’m flying Aer Lingus from Dublin to the USA to meet up with none other than computer pioneer Ted Nelson. 🛫✨ Over the next two weeks, we’ll be diving deep into the challenge of bringing Xanadu to life using modern web technology. A dream collaboration for a digital dreamer. 🌐💡 #XanaduProject #TedNelson #FutureOfTheWeb #DigitalPioneer #AerLingus #DublinAirport
It's kinda wild how relevant Ted Nelson's Computer Lib/Dream Machines still feels. I read a passage to my s/o and she replied "yeah people need to get off the internet," not knowing I was reading words written in 1974.
"Somehow the idea is abroad that computer activities are uncreative, as compared, say, with rotating clay against your fingers until it becomes a pot. This is categorically false. Computers involve imagination and creation at the highest level. Computers are an involvement you can really get into, regardless of your trip or your karma. They are toys, they are lools, they are glorious abstractions.
So it you like mental creation, toy trains, or abstractions, computers are for you. If you are interested in democracy and its future, you'd better understand computers. And It you are concerned about power and the way it is being used, and aren't we all right now, the same thing goes."
(Not the aforemention passage; just another one I liked)
@olea Yes. I've worked with Ted on and off over the years. We spent a month working together on his ZigZag project at the Internet Archive in 2012. Then we worked together on Xanadu for a month in 2017 and two weeks in 2023. We're going to spend another two weeks on Xanadu in February this year.
I was writing a presentation and I wished I’d had a parallel document with stage notes; and in the presentation I wished I could link to values in the founders biography or media clips from recent town halls; and I wished I could link to a document of themes and tropes for emergent rhetorical callbacks to put into the stage notes.
And for a brief moment I saw the dream of Ted Nelson’s “Xanadu.” And then I looked back at the Stone Age tools before me like Caesar at Alexander’s tomb, and lamented.
@Runkefer @bosak @harrymccracken 🧵Computer Lib
I posted a nomination to The Verge:
The story goes that the first Velvet Underground album sold only 30,000 copies in its first five years, but every copy started a band. Ted Nelson’s self-published two-sided book pushed personal computing, interactive computer graphics — and hypertext - into so many people’s heads so forcefully that it changed the world we live in, like the Velvet Underground.
@Runkefer @bosak @harrymccracken 🧵Computer Lib
Yes - Microsoft Press reprinted it ‘trade paperback’ style in 1987.
The ‘New Media Reader’ published a great Computer Lib review and sample:
“Computer Lib / Dream Machines is the most important book in the history of new media.
Nelson’s volume is often called the first personal computer book… This, however, was only one of the many visions, prescient and influential,
offered in the volume.”
http://www.newmediareader.com/book_samples/nmr-21-nelson.pdf
@bosak @harrymccracken 🧵Computer Lib
You can still buy a republished 2013 reprint of the original edition directly from Ted for $111 (original text, TN graphics, flip book tabloids layout). It’s great.
But ‘quantities are limited’ and I don’t know if he still has copies. So step right up!
https://computerlibbook.com/products/computer-lib-dream-machines
I've realized that vector embeddings used by LLMs remind me of Nelson's Th3 from 1974 Dream Machines. A projection of text “points” into a 3D space which itself is a user-driven visualization of various dimensions contained in the text: https://archive.org/details/computer-lib-dream-machines/page/n58/mode/1up
🧵 Ted Nelson vs the technoid vision
"Ladies and gentlemen, the age of prestidigitative presentation and publishing is about to begin. Palpitating presentations, screen-scribbled, will dance to your desire, making manifest the many mysteries of winding wisdom. But if we are to rehumanize an increasingly brutal and disagreeable world, we must step up our efforts. And we must hurry. Hurry. Step right up."
Barnum-Tronics (Dec 1970)
#TedNelson #hypertext
https://archive.org/details/stx_swarthmore-college-bulletin-1970-12/page/12/mode/2up
“The technoid vision, as expressed by various pundits of electronic media, seems to be this: tomorrow's world will be terribly complex, but we won't have to understand it.” — Ted Nelson (1997)
For Nelson, what you see and interact with on a computer screen should be an inspired product of human intelligence, created using new engines of expression, forming an endlessly evolving and deeply intertwingled corpus of literature.
As someone who was part of the beginning of the World Wide Web,
Jamie Zawinski is always good for interesting historic tidbits:
https://www.jwz.org/blog/2024/01/hypertext-emerges-from-his-well-to-shame-the-tech-industry/
Of course I would have loved to see this demonstration:
"He also showed us the most recent version of Xanadu, implemented in Emacs Lisp. "
IIRC, funding was always a problem.
he thought the future of computing was terminals to servers, not personal computers. this dried up quite a bit of interest/funding as PCs came into focus.
and, like #TedNelson, #Engelbart thought in ways that few others did. they missed much of his wisdom as he was "too early".
i think the biggest blow to his work was the lack of interest by business research labs (Xerox, ATT, IBM, etc.) as they funded mac/pc products instead.
I contend that the purpose of computers is human freedom.
-- Ted Nelson
The Internet's forgotten collaborative future:
https://www.quora.com/Who-invented-the-modern-computer-look-and-feel/answer/Harri-K-Hiltunen
#Memex #VannevarBush #Dynabook #AlanKay #ProjectXanadu #TedNelson #Dynamicland #BretVictor
In confluence (wiki software from Atlassian) there is an “excerpt” feature that lets you do “transclusions”.
You mark one part of a page as “excerptable” and then from any other page you can “include” that “excerpt”.
It’s quite neat. Helps you have the same content reused and reordered in different ways.
"Everything is deeply intertwingled."
@BillySmith & btw I was very honored and fortunate to meet and talk to hypertext pioneer Ted Nelson, a few years ago at an event at #InternetArchive headquarters, San Francisco. IA and its founder/director @brewsterkahle are—like Nelson—major inspirations to me; IA a core & constant asset in my life and projects. #BrewsterKahle #InternetArchive c/ @internetarchive #TedNelson #THNelson
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