1995 Vannevar Bush symposium: Closing Panel | Hacker News Reader

1995 Vannevar Bush symposium: Closing Panel

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155 pointslispython45 comments

I had no idea what NLS was so I did a quick wikipedia search: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NLS_(computer_system)

"One of NLS's most revolutionary features, the Journal, was developed in 1970 by Australian computer engineer David A. Evans as part of his doctoral thesis.[6] The Journal was a primitive hypertext-based groupware program which can be seen as a predecessor (if not the direct ancestor) of all contemporary server software that supports collaborative document creation (like wikis). It was used by ARC members to discuss, debate, and refine concepts in the same way that wikis are being used today."

A wiki in 1970. I feel like we've forgotten so much.

Gibson's "The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed" comes to mind.

Here's the video of that panel discussion: https://archive.org/details/XD1941_10_95VannevarBushSymTape1...

and the entire Symposium: https://archive.org/search.php?query=%221995%20Vannevar%20Bu...

Edit: The Doug Engelbart Institute has some more info on the event http://www.dougengelbart.org/events/vannevar-bush-symposium....

Interesting post, but could use a [1995] in the title.

For those that are interested in some radical proposals to try and move things forward, I recommend having a look at the work that's being done at the Viewpoints Research Institute (with among others, Alan Kay):

http://www.viewpointsresearch.org/

There's a lot of different papers, but the last annual report of STEPS is a good place to start:

http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2011004_steps11.pdf

[edit: Sadly, as far as I've been able to figure out, the kscript and ksworld software mentioned in the last few reports, isn't available anywhere. But I did discover a port of squeak to the lively (js) kernel system:

https://github.com/bertfreudenberg/SqueakJS ]

Can someone recommend a book that would talk about all this stuff in more detail? By all this stuff, I guess I mean all the dreams about personal computing that never came to fruition. Ideally with little fluff and a lot of technical detail.

not sure if there's a book, but what I can see all this while, PARC produce a lot of awesome things that never reach their full potential, even now

If there's anyone out there with enough knowledge of this stuff, I'd happily fund a Kickstarter project to get a book written.

Samesies.

It is so important that something like this happens. The mental image of all the knowledge workers of the world riding tricycles because a real bike is "too difficult", is absolutely perfect.

What about links? Does anyone have links to similar material of high quality? Here's the original As We May Think : http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-ma...

I've linked Engelbart's site http://www.dougengelbart.org/ is here, the Sketchpad thesis http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/techreports/UCAM-CL-TR-574.pdf is here. There's lots more stuff if you search the academic literature carefully.

I have enough knowledge of this material to write two books on this subject. I'd love to write it, I maybe have three chapters written already. With some effort we could even include some demo's of these systems (see my hn profile for my email).

"Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age" is pretty good:

http://www.amazon.com/Dealers-Lightning-Xerox-PARC-Computer/...

Ted's book is fantastic, Computer Lib and Dream Machines.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Lib_/_Dream_Machines

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Computer-Lib-Dream-Machines-Tempus/d...

Technical description of Xanadu is buried in places like

http://transliterature.org/

http://www.xanadu.com.au/ted/XUsurvey/xuDation.html

http://xanadu.com/xanasimp

(See also http://hyperland.com/TedCompOneLiners and http://hyperland.com/mlawLeast.html for overview/philosophy and http://hyperland.com/mlawLeast.html for some links.)

EDIT: And there's another book, Literary Machines http://www.worldcat.org/title/literary-machines/oclc/4017610... but good luck finding a cheap copy.

Thanks for filling out the technical side :) Here's Ted showing ZigZag, just because;

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WEj9vqVvHPc

If only it'd be re-released (and preferably as epub or something) -- but just a straight reprint would be great. It's pretty hard to get hold of!

Not quite all the same stuff, but I recommend Waldrop’s book The Dream Machine: J.C.R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal.

This NLS screencast from 2006 http://vimeo.com/81336768 is probably a decent starting point.

It's not a book I recommend this article http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/3.06/xanadu.html about Ted Nelson and Xanadu. Entertaining reading.

The Curse of Xanadu By Gary Wolf

It was the most radical computer dream of the hacker era. Ted Nelson's Xanadu project was supposed to be the universal, democratic hypertext library that would help human life evolve into an entirely new form. Instead, it sucked Nelson and his intrepid band of true believers into what became the longest-running vaporware project in the history of computing - a 30-year saga of rabid prototyping and heart-slashing despair. The amazing epic tragedy.

Nelson was furious about the article and believed it had misrepresented him and Xanadu, evidently with some reason: http://web.archive.org/web/20001101230424/http://www2.educ.k...

Thank you, thank you! I had always hoped there would be some kind of follow-up to the Wired article.

And some more detail: http://web.archive.org/web/20001003011753/http://xanadu.com....

Vaporware might be too strong a description, but an "amazing epic tragedy" that chewed up three decades of very smart people's effort is correct, from what I've heard from a friend who looked at what they produced.

Besides taking way way too long, as not uncommon in stealth mode projects they failed make sure their system was end to end usable. My fried said trying to make a browser/viewer/whatever for Xanadu required using an API that was impossibly complicated, and while I don't remember the specifics now, he cited them in detail.

There used to be some kind of implementation (a mock-up, really) on-line with a text one could zoom out and in and surf from "things" to "things" but I can't find it anymore.

"What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry" (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0143036769/ref=as_li_ss_tl?...) covers the story in great detail.

Another suggestion that's not a book:

Ted Nelson made a bunch of videos [0] recently telling his story. Not a lot of technical details, but I found it enlightening nonetheless.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLTI2Kz0V2OFlgbkROVmzk...

Dealers of Lightening (http://www.amazon.com/Dealers-Lightning-Xerox-PARC-Computer/...) is a great book about the contributions and founding of Xerox PARC.

Also, when Alan Kay said they structured the research like baseball what did he mean? Maybe something about not hitting a home run every time?

Also a very interesting read: A Conversation with Alan Kay, ACM Queue, 2004, https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1039523

I got to meet Ted Nelson a couple of years ago when he gave a talk at a designer/developer conference in Brookyln [0]. He was talking about hypermedia document transclusion, and directed graph mapping of hyperlinked documents. I was one of the ~5 people in the room who got really excited. The other 200 or so... well, let's say they didn't get it.

A lot of the things these guys talk about are really, really abstract concepts, and it takes a special kind of creativity to realize what a big deal they could be. Since most people don't have that (and since it's even rarer among people who market products)... we get repackaged word processors.

[0] https://brooklynbeta.org/

"Education is a process of ruining subjects for you and the last subject to be ruined determines your profession"

that makes a lot of sense to me, and partly explains why I'm in IT / computers now

> "Education is a process of ruining subjects for you and the last subject to be ruined determines your profession" that makes a lot of sense to me, and partly explains why I'm in IT / computers now

Being unemployed for most of my life, that quote sounds way out of touch.

One of the best ways to ruin a subject is to tell someone who has been studying very hard at said subject and also has made spectacular progress, that they should stick to what they are capable of - and then tell them they are just wasting their time and should stick to sweeping streets and cleaning shit stained toilets. It's even more of an insult to receive criticisms in writing, with poor spelling and grammar.

If, unlike myself, you have a full time job and don't get treated like a retard, rejoice.

It's striking how all those GUI discussions and moaning about Microsft seems totally irrelevant now. I remember those days well and I can't recall anybody envisioning the way we interact with information via mobile devices now. Interestingly, I hear a lot less complaining about the state of computing now although there's plenty of complaining about what mobility has done to human interaction in general.

mobile UI isn't very powerful, compared to Kay & Engelbart's applications either, though. They were focused on quick and powerful editing of content - mobile apps hardly allow you to edit anything at all.

Very interesting discussion.

One gem: "So the way I hope that it will work for the Web protocols and the WWW standards which I hope will be able to evolve from their kludgy current state towards that beautiful golden dream is that in any case where you lay down a standard, you also allow there to a second and you show a path whereby is a third one comes up that is better you can move in that direction on the heels of the first, keeping it honest and you have a hook in it to be able to hook it all together later on." (Tim Berners-Lee)

Is there a working emulator for Engelbart's NLS system anywhere?

There was something which worked well enough to produce the 2006 screencast http://vimeo.com/81336768 . But the project http://hyperscope.org/ seems to be abandoned and the download page is missing.

Looks like Doug Engelbart was part of the team and he's died.

It seems to have continued here: http://codinginparadise.org/weblog/2006/12/ann-hyperscope-11...

The demo might not work as I was viewing OPML. Probably wasn't served with the correct mime type to be recognised as XML. Would work locally though.

After Doug Engelbart died I poked around and found a clone of his Augment software. It's a Windows 3.0 application, this company still uses it and sells copies for $150:

http://www.ndma.com/resources/ndm8543.htm

Comes with a decent manual. I've played around with it a bit but not too much so far.

It's limited to 8-character filenames, and seems more mouse-dependent than I prefer, though maybe I just don't know all the tricks. These days, emacs with org-mode and evil-mode might be a more productive implementation of similar ideas. But it's still pretty interesting. Curiously, one thing that people have criticized as unintuitive is its modal verb-noun command structure, which as a Vim user I find completely natural.

How well this software really captures NLS, I can't say.

I would think that a piece of software which intends to have a markedly different user-interaction with the computer would show, in concrete terms, what that interaction looks like - through the technology of photographics or videography. Especially when wanting $150 for it. I guess I ask too much.

I tried to email that group and didn't get a response -- have you had any luck?

I ended up phoning them. They were pleasantly surprised that someone wanted to buy their old Windows 3.0 software. Mostly they just use it internally.

Once I got connected they were really nice and helpful.

Have you used the software?

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