
Ted Nelson: It All Went Wrong at Xerox PARC - mgunes
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c6SUOeAqOjU
======
fidotron
Oh dear. This is a Jef Raskin-esque rant of an old man that's realised they
aren't going to be nearly as influential in the history books as they once
thought. I would hope never to have to do the same, either from delusions in
the present or anger at the end!

This business of underplaying or demeaning the importance of the use of icons,
fonts, or familiar metaphors in favour of some abstract notion of an interface
that no one has succeeded in ever implementing, not least because no one can
agree on what it should be, is a running theme. This is often accompanied by
banging on about the importance of what are really just clerical operations.

PARC, like any office of a large organisation, was invariably subject to
revisionist history, office politics and all sorts of other nonsense, but
attempting to deny the fact they did produce the direction for our last 30
years (and possibly into the near future) is ludicrous, much as a similar rant
against Bell Labs would be misguided.

Most specifically he glosses over the fact that the nature of applications in
the environments at PARC had far blurrier lines around the edges than say iOS
apps do. They had things like OLE, which the web is clearly trending to
recreate in the form of web components because though implementations have
sucked the idea itself makes sense to people.

Paying close attention to the ideas from PARC you can see that the real
philosophical difference is Nelson is closer to the idea of an all ruling
single document format - whereas the vision PARC believed in was an all ruling
single code format. Once more the parallel to the evolution of the web is
clear, in that what began as a way to distribute documents is morphing,
slowly, into a method for distributing rich code objects.

~~~
nakedrobot2
Can anyone explain what the parent means by "Jef Raskin-esque rant" ?

~~~
mmcconnell1618
Jef Raskin was a computer/ui designer who worked on the Canon Cat before
becoming the leader on the Macintosh program at Apple. Steve Jobs took over
the program and Jef was, by some accounts, forced out of the project. He
expressed strongly opinionated ideas about what computer interfaces should be
in a way that many see as rants about what might have been.

His book, The Humane Inerface ([http://www.amazon.com/The-Humane-Interface-
Directions-Intera...](http://www.amazon.com/The-Humane-Interface-Directions-
Interactive/dp/0201379376)) does have some interesting thoughts on how novice
and expert users have completely different ways of interacting with machines.

~~~
tygorius
As has been pointed out, you've got the sequence reversed. Raskin was on the
original Macintosh team first. His ideas for the project included keeping the
cost down. Things like using an 8-bit CPU (the 6809?) rather than the still-
pricey 68000, a character-based display rather than bit-mapped, etc. He later
created his own company and used those ideas in what became the Canon Cat
product -- something that looked like a shrunken ADM-3A terminal. It kept all
your documents on a floppy disk eschewing normal filesystem in favor of a
Forth-based image system (not too unlike Smalltalk images).

Unfortunately he was convinced his ideas for interfaces should be protected by
patents, virtually guaranteeing that things like his "leap" keys would never
be adopted.

Back in the 1960s and 1970s there was a tremendous sense of possibility for
what computers could do for us on the personal level. I think Nelson, like
Alan Kay, is worth revisiting on that basis: reminding us of possibilities,
not so much who was right and wrong or who was first to think of X.

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michaelwww
As user jasonwatkinspdx pointed out, he's doing this at the Internet Archive
headquarters. He's probably for purpose of recording an oral history. It
appears that rather than taking the route of singing the glories of great men
past, he figures there's enough of that, so he's giving an alternate view that
he calls "computers for cynics" to record some of the less glorious aspects of
personal computer history. I think he's made the right choice, although if you
weren't aware of the context he would seem to be a bit of a crank.

Edit: If you watch "Computers for Cynics 4 - The Dance of Apple and Microsoft
[1] he's much less cranky and sings praises to Steve Jobs in a way that made
me re-evaluate my opinion of Jobs.

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_xL19f48m9U](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_xL19f48m9U)

~~~
1amzave
Hmm -- I watched "Computers for Cynics 1 - The Nightmare of Files and
Directories" (which I won't bother linking to, because frankly I can't
recommend watching it), since file and storage systems are a topic of some
interest to me.

It was similarly cranky, and littered with statements that were either poor
descriptions of the concepts they aimed to explain, highly misleading, or just
flat-out incorrect (if he has any idea how filesystems actually work, he's
doing a damn good job hiding it).

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joe_the_user
This is a fascinating discussion. It is especially worth watching to the end.

Among other things, it seems like one could apply this argument to claim that
the-web-as-interface is strictly better than the PARC-style GUI.

It well known, however, that Nelson objects to the web nearly as much as he
objects to the "PUI". And this is because web is at best as a leaky simulation
of multi-part document rather than a real implementation of Nelson's Xanadu
vision (articulated in the 60's).

The thing is the Xanadu vision, multi-part documents with living links
(distributed version control, permissions and etc) is more or less impractical
to implement fully.

On the other hand, the point that a single-person word-processor certainly
could use a series of piece a-la the pre-computer method he describes.

As Nelson mentions, one of the key ways the PUI was able to dominate was by
organizing a variety of operations with a single metaphor. I suspect that
Nelson is underestimating how important that is for making computers
accessible to people.

~~~
gum_ina_package
This video of his seems to give more of a demonstration of his alternative
paradigm:

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=En_2T7KH6RA](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=En_2T7KH6RA)

It's really interesting to see, but in order for any of his idea to actually
work you need to rethink the entire operating system it seems - not just the
UI. He wants all content to have history, which would fundamentally break copy
and paste (one of his points actually). The problem I see with that is you'd
still have individual files (actual bits) on the hard drive, just they'd all
have some meta content that describes it's origin. Or you'd need some sort of
database file system (WinFS).

I'd like to see technology trending more this guy's way, but the reality is
that the technological challenges seem to be too great at the moment.

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leoc
It's Ted Nelson rattling through some of his computer-history notes on camera.
So it's good material, but it's much better presented in his enjoyable and
reasonably-priced book /Geeks Bearing Gifts/ [http://www.lulu.com/shop/ted-
nelson/geeks-bearing-gifts/pape...](http://www.lulu.com/shop/ted-nelson/geeks-
bearing-gifts/paperback/product-4312837.html) .

I noted a couple of apparent mistakes: at
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c6SUOeAqOjU#t=4m26s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c6SUOeAqOjU#t=4m26s)
Nelson says that Xerox paid Jobs to look at the PARC work, while AFAIK Apple
in fact paid Xerox, in pre-IPO Apple stock. He also suggested that Xerox tried
to bring in Jobs, when it seems to have been Apple who made the approach (at
the instigation of Jef Raskin at Apple).
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c6SUOeAqOjU#t=2m15s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c6SUOeAqOjU#t=2m15s)
is misleading. PARC was more-or-less forbidden to buy a DEC PDP-10, which
would have reflected badly on the competing machines from Xerox's new
acquisition Scientific Data Systems, so PARC built a PDP-10 clone (the MAXC)
in-house for their own use. That had very little to do with why they later
designed and built the Altos: there was nothing remotely similar to an Alto
out there that they could have bought (Nelson knows this).

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rst
Interesting thoughts; it would be nice to have a transcript. (It's somewhat
ironic in the light of the content that while he's clearly reading a prepared
text, it's presented in a way that makes excerpting or reorganization nearly
impossible; worse even than files of plain text.)

~~~
watershawl
Youtube videos are auto-transcribed by Google for closed-captioning purposes.
You can view the closed caption transcript by clicking the "Transcript" icon
under the video. It's in between the "Add to" and "Statistics" icon unless
specifically removed by the uploader.

I especially like the last line:

13:52in order to sell printers they threw away the universe 13:58thank you

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syntaxfree
I love Ted Nelson. He had a vision of a future that never materialized, and
never will, but he's not bitter. Instead, he's keen on showing people that
this "future" thing isn't an inevitable train crashing towards us, but the
result of many, many choices, none of them neutral.

------
endlessvoid94
It's very difficult to get past his tone in this video -- he seems angry and
disgruntled.

I'm not saying he doesn't have valid criticisms, but he's not making it very
easy to sympathize with him.

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afterburner
Someone run this through a compressor, or advise him to stop with the sudden
shouts... hurts to listen to...

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eliwjones
His point about the bastardization of "cut and paste" is very important in my
opinion. Hell, he ends with this..

Bringing a complex tangle of code to heel becomes tractable if you just print
it out, cut it up, and rearrange the parts.

It would be fairly sexy to be able to do this on your computer... granted, you
need a lot of screen space to pull it off.

Oh, and I'm ignorant of Ted Nelson.... But it seems fairly obvious these talks
are meant to be taken with some humour.

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rch
I enjoy Ted Nelson when he's sharing historical context, but I hope he
realizes that most of the salient points he is making are perfectly obvious to
rather a lot of technical people. Affecting meaningful change or progress will
take more than impassioned pontification.

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mankypro
Some dude once said "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to
repeat it", and he was right.

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miket
Is he sitting on a church pew?

~~~
jasonwatkinspdx
Looks like the Internet Archive headquarters:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:The_main_hall_at_Internet_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:The_main_hall_at_Internet_Archive_\(2013\).jpg)

~~~
Redoubts
Well, apparently the Archive HQ is a former Christian Science church.

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acqq
Steve Jobs would just say: "real artists ship"

[http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Real_Artists_Ship...](http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Real_Artists_Ship.txt)

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nickbauman
Is it just me or is Ted's vision basically OpenDoc?

[http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDoc](http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDoc)

~~~
DougMerritt
Not even a little bit close -- nor can you pick up what his vision has been
from that video.

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AlecEifel
Old man, bitter that Alan Key, Steve Jobs & Xerox PARC got more money & credit
than he ever did. Who the hell cares about his gripes? The "legendary story"
was generally corroborated by all parties involved.

Ted Nelson has yet to admit missing the boat by never being able to release
anything in over 40 years. He is a super-consultant & inverse opposite of what
Y&C stands for. A great visionary with zero implementation skill. Time to die.

~~~
pekk
Telling an old man it's "time to die" because you idolize PARC or Jobs or
something is completely, unacceptably rude.

~~~
Gigablah
Sociopathic, even.

~~~
smrtinsert
Typical iOS dev?

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agumonkey
I wonder if meant 'PARC User Interface aka POOEY' ?

