Hyperspace in the 1970s: Tony Buzan’s early hypertext system for paper | Hacker News Reader

Hyperspace in the 1970s: Tony Buzan’s early hypertext system for paper

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If something reminds me of Hyperlinks, then it is this guy with his 20k interlinked paper cards.

https://takesmartnotes.com/uncategorized-en/2017/03/welcome-...

https://zettelkasten.de/posts/luhmann-folgezettel-truth/

"This guy" was Niklas Luhmann, by the way, an influential (and regularly misunderstood) German sociologist and social theorist, heavily inspired by Parsons and cybernetics.

This has sent me down quite a rabbit hole! Now reading a book about it (How to Take Smart Notes) and trying to find some suitable software to make a slip-box (zettelkasten) with.

This guy is a great teacher (enjoyed his YouTube lecture), it seems to me that Hyperspace planted the Idea of HyperText which now has become the Internet, however the core idea originated from neuroscience - how neurons are interconnected in the brain, therefore, the most appropriate name for internet should be "Neural Network" which co-incidentally is now used only in the field of ML.

yeah he is so entertaining as a speaker, even in his older years - sometimes cheesy but I also have a soft spot for that

The word "hyperspace" seems to appear only in the article's title, but your comment made me wonder.. It would make sense that "hypertext" arose from "hyperspace". I traced back the etymology and it looks like the 19th-century mathematician Bernhard Riemann was the first to coin the word, at least the concept of nth-dimensional geometry.

The idea of higher dimensions was quite popular among artists in the early 20th century [0], and I theorize that somehow the stream reached Ted Nelson when he came up with "hypertext".

From his "Brief Words on the Hypertext" (1967): "'Hyper-' is used in the mathematical sense of extension and generality (as in 'hyperspace,' 'hypercube')."

He also mentions how "hypermedia" represents "complexes of branching and responding graphics, movies and sound – as well as text".

The use of the word "branching" is reminiscent of neural networks, and it makes me wonder about the correspondences between the structure of the brain (or "mind") and space itself.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_dimension_in_art

Nice find and thanks for sharing the sources.

Prezi seems to be the closest modern presentation tool building on these ideas. I think the concept of engaging spatial intelligence is brilliant but I find the creation UX not as intuitive as I’d like. https://prezi.com/

Anyone have other examples of mindmappy software with good UI?

I've often found JS-based presentations even cooler than Prezi. There're many examples, one which I like is: https://impress.js.org

Although, the creation UX is more tailored to programmers than people who don't code.

Interesting demo, thanks! Haven’t tried on computer yet. On ios firefox it’s flashy but glitchy when animating through slides. JS based would be killer with no glitchiness.

You're welcome! I've mostly tried it on PC/Mac with no glitches. Maybe iOS Safari can handle JS better than FF.

not exactly 'mind mappy', but some form of analog:

1) use a wiki

2) write a script to build a graph of the links

3) use graphviz or similar to view this

I both love and hate Prezi, great idea but horrible UX/UI.

The beauty of it is that you can start with pen and paper. Mind mapping apps are like multi-vitamins; just pick one and go. I prefer SimpleMind for its touch-friendly UI, cross-platform support, and consistent updates, but you can use almost anything out there to get rolling.

If you find this interesting, I recommend the Moonwalking with Einstein

I just finished this book and really enjoyed it.

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