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Comment by jka | Hacker News Reader

I must have experienced this article completely differently from you a couple of hours ago when reading it - I thought that it claims that the origin of the blue links was user experience research from the 1980s?

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I think OP is glossing over how much of a leap it is from Hyperties to Berners-Lee. (I was curious because the story 'red is too strong!!!' is a good fit for my https://www.gwern.net/Red page.) As written, it sounds like the color research was reported in the _Hypertext on Hypertext_ package, and Berners-Lee had a copy and was deeply immersed in it. Neither is true.

The first paper from the Hyperties group cited (https://www.gwern.net/docs/design/1986-koved.pdf) does not cover color at all. It does mention some user-testing. I checked all the papers in _Hypertext on Hypertext_ and none mention Hyperties or color in any major way. (The keynote is a good read, incidentally: https://www.gwern.net/docs/design/1988-vandam.pdf ) If you look at the Berners-Lee document cited, the Hyperties mention is buried in the bibliography; it is not even cited in the main text nor is Hyperties or link coloring mentioned, so I'm not sure why it's there at all, but it sounds like one of those cites-just-to-be-comprehensive, which often mean the author has never read the citation in question - so based on that, I'm unsure that way over in Europe Berners-Lee read any of the papers, much less actually saw the disk in action. The historical Hyperties page includes videos which show that by the time of the disk, they had defaulted to blue for link coloring, and mentions testing 3 colors (red was also used in Hyperties for other interface parts, so obviously they tested red vs blue vs ???). But the Hyperties papers after that do not mention color anywhere either. In fact, I can't find any Hyperties publication at all which reports the color usertesting or even that the results favored blue. It seems you just had to look at _Hypertext on Hypertext_ and assume that they picked blue because it was good?

So, checking OP's references, I think Berners-Lee may never have seen _Hypertext on Hypertext_ (at least, in computer form); and if he had, he would not have known the blue was the result of user testing (because nothing in it says so); and if he had both seen & deduced that, he may not have both remembered & cared years later when setting up his own browser defaults for color monitors, and he doesn't say so anywhere.

It's an interesting pattern with academic HCI work like this. For instance, Shneiderman (who did legitimately innovative design work!) often claims not only Hyperties's hyperlink styling as an academia -> industry success story but also the iPhone keyboard: his group had done a series of usability studies on various tiny keyboard approaches. And yet Ken Kocienda, who actually created the iPhone keyboard, has told me he was unaware of this work (and in fact never surveyed prior work). I've heard the same story for CSCW interface elements. Not encouraging!

I think it's common to a lot of tech work where convergent evolution or exogenous drivers are important. This is something that I rant about in machine learning too: very often, researchers invent something by trial-and-error or just independently, and then they forge an academic pedigree or theory to retrodict their results. It's everywhere, just most researchers drop all of the failed experiments and focus on post hoc explaining the ones that worked. (Schmidhuber is the patron saint of this kind of intellectual fraud, which raises 'post hoc ergo propter hoc' to the only rule of history.)

I would merely roll my eyes at this (does it really hurt anyone to believe that 'Shneiderman designed the iPhone keyboard'? HCI people know almost all their work is useless anyway), but it leads people to greatly overvalue the role of theory and understanding in ML progress, and undervalue the role of compute. If you believe that resnets were invented by thinking hard to come up with a beautiful theory about identity transformations & gradient propagation, then you are going to make different forecasts and emphasize different things than if you knew the reality was that resnets had been repeatedly invented but failed because there wasn't enough compute to show that they worked on anything but toy problems like the swiss roll and the final invention of resnets was grad students throwing random archs at the wall to see what stuck who happened to have enough GPUs that they could show it worked amazingly well on ImageNet and then had to explain why mashing together multiple layers with additional connections did anything.

Are you specifically referring to "Extreme Learning Machines", or lots of ML stuff and tech work in general? ;)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_learning_machine#Contr...

You gotta admit, it's an awesome new name for some good old concepts (kinda like "AJAX"). Many Millennial Brogrammers eat that edgy macho shit up. They should throw Mega Monster Extreme Learning Machine Hack-O-Thon Training Rallies every Sunday, Sunday, Sunday !!!!!!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ohp_nmI_TFA

The same kind of macho dick oriented subversion happened when Mark Weiser's sissy Calm Technology / Ubiquitous Computing got rebranded by IBM's macho Pervasive Computing Division. (Because it's all about dividing and penetrating and grabbing and embedding trophies of desire and charging attacks and swearing about war metaphors in the trenches!)

https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/ibm-vows-to-...

>IBM vows to make computing pervasive: Big Blue voices its intention to grab a piece of the pervasive computing market, where computing power and Net access are embedded in everything from handhelds to cars.

https://www.eweek.com/mobile/ibm-takes-on-pervasive-computin...

>IBM Takes on Pervasive Computing: While everyones still talking about the potential of wireless technologies, Rod Adkins, general manager of IBMs pervasive computing division, is in the trenches, helping the Armonk, N.Y., company develop wireless solutions for its customers. A major initiative at IBM, pervasive computing extends e-business to new devices. Adkins is charged with integrating IBMs technology, software, hardware and services into wireless and mobile solutions.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21765409

DonHopkins on Dec 11, 2019 | parent | context | favorite | on: Flutter: UI platform designed for ambient computin...

31 years late, Google attempts to re-brand "Ubiquitous Computing" (aka "Calm Technology") as "Ambient Computing". At least it sounds more mellow, less intrusive, unwelcome, penetrative, and phallic than the other attempt at rebranding UbiComp as "Pervasive Computing" in order to sell it to the military.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubiquitous_computing

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calm_technology

https://www.researchgate.net/post/What_is_differents_between...

https://internetofthingsagenda.techtarget.com/definition/per...

>The term pervasive computing followed in the late 1990s, largely popularized by the creation of IBM's pervasive computing division. Though synonymous today, Professor Friedemann Mattern of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich noted in a 2004 paper that:

>Weiser saw the term 'ubiquitous computing' in a more academic and idealistic sense as an unobtrusive, human-centric technology vision that will not be realized for many years, yet [the] industry has coined the term 'pervasive computing' with a slightly different slant. Though this also relates to pervasive and omnipresent information processing, its primary goal is to use this information processing in the near future in the fields of electronic commerce and web-based business processes. In this pragmatic variation -- where wireless communication plays an important role alongside various mobile devices such as smartphones and PDAs -- ubiquitous computing is already gaining a foothold in practice.

You say pervasive, I say perversive. Let's call the whole thing off.

Going off the main topic—just went through your “Red” page and, as always, it’s a treat. (I think you might be a bit too quick to dismiss the historical paucity of inks, given how very traditionalist typography is, but then again even among the most progressive of artists it’s still the bathing of the red horse for some reason... Also a bit surprised to see no mention of amber screens alongside green ones, even if colours of early monochrome terminals seem to have been more constrained by the available coatings and their properties than by ergonomics.) A technical note: it seems unfortunate for an article about red on white background that illustrations have their colours transformed by default in dark mode, so maybe a manual exception is in order for this specific page?

I've never run into much material about amber screens, so while I know of them, I dunno if they were anything but a minor variant or if they worked better or if users liked them more. The green motif is so much more dominant in computing history memories.

(You make a good point about dark mode - it uses a heuristic to decide to invert, which is correct on images with a lot of white, which you usually don't want to see in dark mode, but /Red is an exception where the page is specifically about the color. I'll disable inverting on those images.)

I have to admit I have no deep knowledge of amber screens, I just thought of them because the first computer I’ve seen had one (and even now I prefer amber on black to green on black).

I think there was the thing where a green screen requires less beam energy for the same brightness, but while I can see why this might be relevant for oscilloscopes, which use electrostatic deflection (and indeed almost universally have green screens), for a large terminal screen with electromagnetic deflection it shouldn’t be that important. And besides, colour TVs existed (if perhaps not in a very affordable form) long before the 70s, so one would think that by the time of the VT100 it should have been possible to make a screen of whatever colour one wanted. Yet that is apparently not true?

I think it's possible that the blue links do in fact derive from earlier work, but the article seems pretty muddled. The connection it makes from the earlier work to the web browsers seems to be via the impact it had on Tim Berners-Lee: yet the article once again argues (seemingly incorrectly) that it was Marc and not Tim who introduced blue links:

> Besides that, I was also bothered by the fact that even though I was able to determine that Mosaic was indeed the first browser to use blue hyperlinks, I was not much closer to determining why the hyperlinks themselves were blue.

Thanks - I think I'll have to puzzle over this one for a little longer (so I don't have much to add here), but wanted to acknowledge your response (it does help in understanding your top-level comment).

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