Ted Nelson’s published papers on computers and interaction, 1965 to 1977 | Hacker News Reader

Ted Nelson’s published papers on computers and interaction, 1965 to 1977

archive.org

104 pointskrstoff33 comments

[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.

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.

> 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)

I tire of this same irrelevant point there always appears on Ted as if everyone else is running around shipping perfectly functional software, on time and on budget, like the NHS for example, which failed to build what was essentially a database, with 100 times what Autodesk spent on Xanadu, not adjusting for inflation...

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2013/sep/18/nhs-records-...

Ted is not essentially a programmer, Ted is a creative generalist, inventor and systems designer, why don't you blame the team implementing his ideas ? Not that I would, it was a complex system to implement now, then, well, I cannot imagine!

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 [timestamped to Autodesk discussion for relevance; watch the whole thing]

"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.

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.

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!

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

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.

"... 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

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.

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...

"Open Source Software" was a marketing term coined by ESR to discredit Richard Stallman and misappropriate and subvert his original idea of Free Software.

Imo it's rather simpler than that; he was not a programmer. Idea vs Execution and all that. All the breakout successes from the software era (Oracle, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, Mozilla etc) have programmer founders. Probably just he was ahead of his time; if he had been born 15 years later he probably would have been a programmer.

> 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.

I lived in San Francisco around 1992 and got to know Ted a bit, along with a few others in the Xanadu team. At Ted's houseboat in Sausalito, I witnessed a few demos of the ever-in-progress Xanadu software (and related projects), and saw some of the code.

Ted has always had very strong ideas about treating copyright as technology (see his 'transclusion,' etc.). That's why he's always been bitter about the web winning the hypertext game, without the necessary (in Ted's design) two-way linking with automatic credit (& royalties!). I can imagine Ted being vociferous (in his unique way) in opposition to a blanket release of source code via the distribution technology of the time -- largely Usenet News, FTP sites, and BBS systems. The contemporary landscape of open-source licensing had barely evolved by the early 90s; if you released something on the net, you were pretty much putting it in the public domain. That was antithetical to Ted's goals of creators owning their content.

Even if he had been convinced to release the code, it was in Smalltalk. (It had started out in C, but had been rewritten by the time I saw it.) The culture of Smalltalk never seemed to be very interested in methods of distributing source code. (Or even binary code: ST apps included their entire runtime environment, making them really heavy.) Even if the code was released, the number of people running Smalltalk systems was miniscule.

Finally, Xanadu, for most of its active life in the early 90s, was very much in experimental development. Although Ted had been thinking & designing & writing about Xanadu for decades, I believe this period was the first time he was actually able to commission running software that implemented hypertext. (Ted's not a programmer, nor an engineer.)

As for ‘publishing specs’ — most of the details of Xanadu are described in Nelson’s book _Computer Lib / Dream Machines._ Ted’s written extensively about his hypertext ideas (as this very post points out). I don’t know if Xanadu itself was ever documented, but you could read his book and probably implement most of it — if you dared!

Although Ted has always stood up for the 'regular person' computer user (that's partly what _Computer Lib_ is about), in actuality both the UI of the software, and the inherent concepts, were very weird and outside of what most people would understand. I'm not sure Xanadu would have ended up being any more influential than it already was — Berners-Lee certainly knew of Nelson's work as he was created the WWW.

(@terminalcommand: You seem to appreciate Nelson's work more than most, so please don't take the above as any sort of argument. But because you touched on the open-sourcing issue, I replied here.)

Obligatory reading: 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.

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....

That's an addendum to his letter to Wired http://web.archive.org/web/20001101230424/http://www2.educ.k... , 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.

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.

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 link (yes).

"Xanadu is a story of building castles in the air for thirty years"

You mean the name "Xanadu" is perfectly fitting :)

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'.

If nothing else, he did coin the term.

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.

Documenting this long-developing invention requires mention of Paul Otlet's 'Mundaneum' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mundaneum), to which he devoted decades beginning in 1910.

"Otlet regarded the project as the centrepiece of a new 'world city'—a centrepiece which eventually became an archive with more than 12 million index cards and documents."

H.G. Wells talked of a 'World Brain' in 1936. Little doubt that Bush was aware of these ideas ... not to denigrate his contribution.

Another read: 'Secret History of Hypertext' (https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/05/in-se...)

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.

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

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...

What an incredible genius.

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.

One major problem with Ted's design is that it wasn't simple enough to support multiple compatible implementations.

I'll repeat the James Clark quote from the wonderful DDJ interview that I posted to the other discussion about Ted Nelson:

There's a wonderful DDJ interview with James Clark called "A Triumph of Simplicity: James Clark on Markup Languages and XML" where he explains how a standard has failed if everyone just uses the reference implementation, because the point of a standard is to be crisp and simple enough that many different implementations can interoperate perfectly.

A Triumph of Simplicity: James Clark on Markup Languages and XML: http://www.drdobbs.com/a-triumph-of-simplicity-james-clark-o...

"The standard has to be sufficiently simple that it makes sense to have multiple implementations." -James Clark

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.

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.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com