
Ted Nelson’s published papers on computers and interaction, 1965 to 1977 - krstoff
https://archive.org/details/SelectedPapers1977
======
drallison
[copied from another HN posting linking to the same collection of papers,
which did not get upvoted]

A worthy collection. Theodor "Ted" Nelson's ideas have played a significant
role in shaping the course of computing and thought. His self-published books
(Computer Lib and Literary Machines) are still goldmines of information and
understanding. His papers, some of which appear in this collection, show a
deep understanding of computation that, even today, seems revolutionary.

The World Wide Web is an imperfect implementation of his conceptual model of a
world in which information is completely intertwingled. His concept of
transcopyright provide a workable solution to the question of who owns what in
a digital world. And he is the man who invented the hyperlink.

------
drallison
Ted Nelson is a genuine visionary, the real deal. He sees things that others
do not see (and won't for another decade or two). He knows what is important
(or will be important) and can be irascibly stubborn when explaining what he
wants (needs) to fulfill his vision. He gets impatient trying to bend reality
to fulfill the vision of his personal distortion field. He is difficult and
charming. He is persistent. He creates language and words like "hyperlink",
"intertwingle" and "transclusion" as he tries to explain to mere mortals his
ideas. He writes well. And, more often than not, his vision is correct. Ted
deserves more recognition, perhaps even a Turing Award.

------
teddyh
> _It was this book that persuaded John Walker, founder of Autodesk, to back
> the Xanadu® project in 1988._

…for four years, before Autodesk gave up:

> […] _Come 1992, the “resources of Autodesk” were still funding “talent of
> the Xanadu team” which had not, as of that date, produced anything remotely
> like a production prototype—in fact, nothing as impressive as the 88.1x
> prototype which existed before Autodesk invested in Xanadu. On August 21,
> 1992 Autodesk decided to pull the plug and give its interest in Xanadu back
> to the Xanadudes._

(Quoted from footnote linked from this page:
[https://www.fourmilab.ch/autofile/e5/chapter2_64.html](https://www.fourmilab.ch/autofile/e5/chapter2_64.html))

~~~
cookiecaper
Ted gives a great overview of his life and work at [0]. In this, he ascribes
the demotion/firing of Xu88's project lead Roger Gregory as the reason it
failed to come fruition, and takes credit for the "regrettable" part he played
in this.

The whole talk is a wonderful high-level overview from Ted's perspective,
which is so often warped and misrepresented. Though he admits that he has, at
times, been "overwhelmed by bitterness", he doesn't seem to harbor any lasting
hostility or malice to anyone, and continues to work on seeing his vision come
to life. He identifies many of the mistakes he's made, identifying multiple
critical junctures in which Xanadu may have taken off if he had done something
better.

Strongly recommended, and I'm grateful that he recorded this historical
treasure. Far more valuable and significant than any "incredible journey"
post-mortem.

[0] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mmfjM-
SGlGs?t=1700](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mmfjM-SGlGs?t=1700) [timestamped
to Autodesk discussion for relevance; watch the whole thing]

~~~
keithpeter
" _I didn 't do any one main thing, but I thought of a lot of things first,
inspired a lot of people and coined a lot of words that people use, invented a
few things not well known, and kept telling people about a great new world
that I thought was coming_"

Thanks for that link, most interesting.

------
terminalcommand
Ted Nelson has some novel ideas. But I can't help to think that the failure of
the mass adoption of his ideas stems from him being too greedy. If he had open
sourced the code he wrote for Xanadu, if he had even published specs of a
simple Xanadu system free of copyright he could've brought us a better
hypertext.

The idea that data should consist of small addressable chunks, with each chunk
having relations with other data actually makes a lot of sense.

We are thinking of data linearly, you start from byte 1 to end. Even if you
copy the file or make minor changes the OS considers it another file. You make
a reference to a movie, a novel etc., if you do not explicitly add the
reference no one knows. Then we end up in piles and piles of data we cannot
process. We have to rely on proprietary search engines, we have to rely on our
browser history and our memory.

And with the latest shiniest web apps that fully render in JS we can't even
get addressable future-proof links. Try to access a news page from 10 years
ago, most likely the link won't work. Archive.org helps in that regard. But
things could've been easier.

We have all these resources at hand, we could implement the idea of
transclusion even if it is only limited to our domain. Information-heavy sites
such as Wikipedia, C2-wiki etc. would greatly benefit from it.

It's true that we need a new way to look at data. It is not pen and paper
anymore, we need to be able to go beyond searching. Even now, most of the
world uses plain-old PDF, which is an image of a printable paper. We can use
animations, videos, sound, interactivity in our content, but mostly we don't.

Ted Nelson thinks this is caused by the invention of the GUI (or PUI -Parc
user interface- as he calls it) in Xerox Parc. They needed to show their
managers something they could make sense of. So they created the desktop. Here
is your trash-bin, here is your notepad, here are your documents (e.g
Postscript/PDF). It is _just_ like your physical desk.

But it is not your physical desk, what you have in front of you is a
_computer_. We teach hours and hours of hand-writing to hour children, but
only very few countries teach touch-typing. The old generation either doesn't
understand or doesn't want kids to utilize their full potential with
computers. Fortunately kids learn on their own, build their own online
communities, so there is hope. Any kid that can get his/her hands on Computer
Lib/Dream Machines won't be able to believe the idea that computers are only
good for showing us an enhanced simulation of a work-desk.

~~~
tudorw
Open Source is a contemporary invention introduce by Eric S. Raymond in 1997,
so any failure of Ted to utilise it is a bit unfair as he was living in a
different era. For me the key take away from Ted is the democratisation of
computer use, without Ted there is a very real chance we never would have had
fully functioning stand alone PC's, it was Teds discussions with Bill Lower at
IBM that persuaded them there would be a personal computer market, and that as
a creative media tool, it would find a home in every house, thanks Ted :)
Imagine a world like now, except we only ever got dumb terminals to connect
into Facebook, etc, sure 98% of the world might not notice the difference, but
the flexible computing power in the hands of the 2% has massive potential, as
the open source movement has adequately demonstrated!

~~~
e12e
Eh, bsd is a bit older than that. Raymond certainly caught the buzzword wave
with "the Cathedral and the Bazaar" \- but he wrote it after Gnu was started,
which enabled Torvalds to write/release Linux etc. Raymond offered an
explanation of how Free software could be subsumed by business.

If just some of Nelson's books had seen wider distribution, that might have
helped a lot. It's easy to link to Fielding's thesis, because it's online:

[http://www.ics.uci.edu/~fielding/pubs/dissertation/top.htm](http://www.ics.uci.edu/~fielding/pubs/dissertation/top.htm)

And I actually think some of Nelson's ideas form a fine counter to Fielding's
"sales pitch" for REST. REST is all about achieving high performance alongside
correctness in distributed document/media systems. But as Fielding details in
his introduction: there are other architectures that make more sense for what
is effectively distributed computing: when you need features beyond what REST
can efficiently support.

I believe Nelson had some compelling arguments for why we might want _more_.
And if the contemporary Web is any indication, he was right. There's a place
for REST-style hypertext, and there's a place for richer hypermedia.

I get as angry as the next grumpy old person when a simple Web page is turned
into a single-page application for no gain and considerable pain; but I also
see that there are things we need beyond simple hypertext (which we've tried
to fill with: excel macros with floppies as the transport medium, java
applets, active-x, flash...).

And there's the question of naming/cataloging. It's doubtful DNS is the best
we can do.

~~~
tudorw
"... all versions of BSD incorporated proprietary AT&T Unix code and were,
therefore, subject to an AT&T software license. Source code licenses had
become very expensive and several outside parties had expressed interest in a
separate release of the networking code, which had been developed entirely
outside AT&T and would not be subject to the licensing requirement. This led
to Networking Release 1 (Net/1), which was made available to non-licensees of
AT&T code and was freely redistributable under the terms of the BSD license.
It was released in June 1989."

That's still 15 years after Computer Lib was published so...

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_Software_Distribution](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_Software_Distribution)

~~~
e12e
Yeah, I mostly took issue with the bit about Raymond - not the idea that
demanding that someone who saw micro-transactions and copyright as a means to
fund authors and artist of the future should _also_ cone up with the idea of
Copyleft is a little unreasonable.

Still, Nelson have had year's to reconsider - and I'd be happy if they at
least could've done some reasonably priced reprints - ebooks.

~~~
tudorw
Yes, I should have made the "Open Source" point clearer, I know there's a lot
of history there and I am largely ignorant of it, the gist of it was that it's
not fair to think anyone sitting around in 1970 would automatically assume
there would be an army of programmers willing and able to work for free, it
still surprises me.

Which books are you looking for, Lulu.com has a few reprints,
[https://www.lulu.com/shop/search.ep?keyWords=Ted+Nelson&type...](https://www.lulu.com/shop/search.ep?keyWords=Ted+Nelson&type=)

------
shubhamjain
Obligatory reading:
[https://www.wired.com/1995/06/xanadu/](https://www.wired.com/1995/06/xanadu/).

Xanadu is a story of building castles in the air for thirty years; a project
so disconnected from reality and the collaborators so obsessed with perfection
that they didn't ship the first version until when the Internet had already
reached a critical mass.

~~~
EdwardCoffin
We should probably also link to Nelson's response [1] to what he termed a
hatchet job.

That said, it seems to me that the response is fairly nit-picky. You'd think
that the Xanadu guys could put together an unoptimized demo of what their
vision was using modern tech to brute-force things that would have had to be
finessed. I understand they did release a demo a number of years ago, but I
could never get it to work.

[1] Errors in "The Curse of Xanadu," by Gary Wolf:
[http://web.archive.org/web/20001003011753/http://xanadu.com....](http://web.archive.org/web/20001003011753/http://xanadu.com.au:80/ararat)

~~~
leoc
That's an addendum to his letter to Wired
[http://web.archive.org/web/20001101230424/http://www2.educ.k...](http://web.archive.org/web/20001101230424/http://www2.educ.ksu.edu/Faculty/McGrathD/Fall99/NelsonLtr.htm)
, which is where the weightier issues tend are set out, by and large. Some of
the complaints are indeed small, but I'm sure Nelson would point out that
there are quite a lot of them and they seem intended to make him look bad.

It's clear that there are indeed some serious issues with the Wired story. For
example if you read point 3 of the Wired letter, "Transclusion Misstated",
it's evident that Ted Nelson understood content-addressable networking long
before eg. Bittorrent came about. Gary Wolf, though, apparently didn't quite
get content-addressable networking even after researching Xanadu, meeting with
Nelson himself, and writing a feature article about Xanadu for Wired; but he
pronounced confidently about it in the article anyway.

~~~
EdwardCoffin
I think the addendum you linked to is a refinement of the response I linked
to. I haven't read the addendum thoroughly yet (I hadn't seen it before), but
it seems to be much better than the one I cited. For one thing, he defers nit-
picking in favour of going straight into the more important stuff.

~~~
leoc
The letter to Wired was the main response, the 'Errors in "The Curse of
Xanadu"' document was the detailed addendum to that which (I'm 98% sure) was
the target of the now-dead
[http://xanadu.net/wolfsbane](http://xanadu.net/wolfsbane) link (yes).

------
patkai
I watched several of his YouTube videos. I wish I had a colleague, a boss, a
mentor, a neighbour or a grandpa like him. May he find peace and satisfaction
in the thought in his old age that he could be so humane, inspiring and
loveable in a time when we are so obsessed with machines.

------
kipari
Is Ted Nelson generally seen as the _inventor_ of hypertext? Vannevar Bush's
_As We May Think_ was published in 1945, but it seems that his descriptions of
what would later be called hypertext were too general for him to be seen as
the 'inventor of hypertext'.

~~~
e12e
If nothing else, he did coin the term.

~~~
tudorw
Bush's key message was 'Augmenting Intellect', so personally his angle for me
was intellectual and very educationally driven, Ted'd vision was far more
inclusive of the wider world of media in general, for pleasure and education,
and for me reflects more clearly a vision of what we have now.

------
e12e
BTW, if the handle is to be trusted, I think it's really cool to see original
authors embracing free and open platforms like archive.org :

[https://archive.org/details/@tednelson](https://archive.org/details/@tednelson)

Even if the hypertext is inferior, and there are no transitive, diminishing
microtransactions automatically compensate authors in the case of content
transclusion...

Now, I just whish the books were available in a digital format at a reasonable
promise[ed: reasonable price, lol. But in this case "reasonable promise" works
too]. I remember my university library had a single, battered copy of
"Computer Lib" \- that probably none of the students who were studying
"information science" " (as opposed to computer science) had heard of...

------
jstewartmobile
Ted's problem is that he _still_ thinks his specs are perfect (" _close your
eyes_ " line from a few days ago).

The specs are _never_ perfect, and are almost guaranteed to be wrong prior to
any sort of half-functional implementation. IETF is living proof of that.

If he would have gotten down into the bullpen with his programmers to iron out
the day-to-day wrinkles, he probably would have succeeded.

~~~
cookiecaper
I get the impression that he wouldn't mind the implementation details so much
if the fundamental concepts were working. As many others have stated, Ted
isn't a programmer anyway, so he is not likely to be overly concerned about
the intricacies of the implementation as much as he just wants to ensure that
the system is functionally appropriate.

Two-way hyperlinks and an integrated core of micropayments and publication
have yet to be realized in a substantially useful way. Ted absolutely bears a
lot of the responsibility for this, as he's been given resources to build such
a system multiple times -- but that speaks to his project management
capabilities, which are a different matter.

My read is that Ted isn't nitpicking the details. It's not that the same goals
are being accomplished in some less-than-perfect way. The key point of
contention appears to be that major portions of the vision are still on the
table with no widespread practical or workable implementation, not because the
technology is incapable, but merely because people don't understand either the
original concepts enumerated as hypertext themselves, or don't see any value
in them. Perhaps there isn't value, I don't know. But Ted clearly thinks there
is, and is frustrated by a world that is humming along without these
components that he's been trying to extoll for 50+ years.

It also must really chafe to have people hijack the terminology that
originally encompasses a broad concept, and pretend like some vague, minimal
similarity in an otherwise-adulterated system is the full realization of said
concept. I sympathize greatly with Alan Kay, Ted Nelson, and other visionaries
who've had their concepts co-opted and misrepresented by profiteers, much to
the detriment of the world as a whole.

~~~
jstewartmobile
He designed a system that, to this day, is still more in the realm of science
than engineering. Systems are _full_ of nth-order effects that have to be
discovered and worked around in some practical way.

From what I've read of the Autodesk days, he wasn't even on site. Whether he's
a programmer or not is immaterial. You've got to birth your own baby. That's
just how it works.

~~~
jslabovitz
When I first met Ted, ca. 1991 or 1992, he was indeed doing most of the Xanadu
work on his houseboat in Sausalito. But Autodesk was also in Sausalito, just
down the road, so Ted was definitely in the neighborhood, if not exactly in
the building.

There was some amount of coding happening at the houseboat, though I have a
vague recollection (which may be wrong) that Roger Gregory might have done
much of his work offsite -- at his house? -- and then come to the houseboat
for meetings.

I saw Ted perhaps a year later and it was definitely in his office at the
Autodesk facility. He had quite a nice lab there, and an assistant.

------
marze
What an incredible genius.

