Your Review: Project Xanadu - The Internet That Might Have Been
astralcodexten.com
Your Review: Project Xanadu - The Internet That Might Have Been
In 1972, Engelbart joined an organization called Erhard Seminars Training. EST, or “est” as it was marketed, offered a 60-hour self-improvement course for tech entrepreneurs modeled loosely on Zen Buddhism.
Your Review: Project Xanadu - The Internet That Might Have Been
Cults, messianic figures tied to history of hypertext’s more interesting paths of development.
Unlike Doug Engelhart, and unlike Ted Nelson, Tim Berners-Lee never read about Bush’s memex. He built a system that connected people like never before—but made little effort to facilitate the connection of ideas .
Your Review: Project Xanadu - The Internet That Might Have Been
Interesting that the lack of connection between ideas should lead to an antisocial space.
The team came nowhere close to meeting them. Infighting broke out between two factions—while Gregory simply wanted to patch together his old C code, insisting his product “was within six months of shipping,” the whiz-kid Mark Miller came back from his new job at Xerox PARC, alongside a half-dozen of his closest friends, and insisted on a... See more
Your Review: Project Xanadu - The Internet That Might Have Been
Why Ted Nelson is antagonistic about the Xerox PARC lineage of computer innovation.
“The real dream is for ‘everything’ to be in the hypertext. Everything you read, you read from the screen (and can always get back to right away; everything you write, you write at the screen (and can cross-link to whatever you read).”
Your Review: Project Xanadu - The Internet That Might Have Been
The screen imprisons its master?
Bush “wanted very much to discuss it with” Nelson, but Nelson “hated him instantly [because] he sounded like a sports coach” and never contacted him again.
Your Review: Project Xanadu - The Internet That Might Have Been
A kind of operationality of knowledge is bowing to The Man type of nonsense common among myself and other humanities types since the 70s.
If a writer is really to be helped by an automated system, it ought to do more than retype and transpose: it should stand by him during the early periods of muddled confusion, when his ideas are scraps, fragments, phrases, and contradictory overall designs. And it must help him through to the final draft with every feasible mechanical aid—making... See more
Your Review: Project Xanadu - The Internet That Might Have Been
I agree with Ted here.
He demonstrated his ability to embed documents in one another—images with links to statements, words nested and categorized by one another, files filled with metadata.
Your Review: Project Xanadu - The Internet That Might Have Been
Wait, so was this the actual display of other texts within the same text that Ted Nelson is always going on about?