HN Theater @HNTheaterMonth

Two TN vid's on YT without IEEE's player ...

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

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i67rQdHuO-8

80 TN minutes at the 2021 Vintage Computer Festival East

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7vb0FwsMqn0

whoosh -- That's the second literary reference that went over my head when transcribing an interesting Ted Nelson video. I originally guessed he was saying that "Franklin Brouwer Zeus" invented the internet, when he actually said people thought "it sprang from the brow of Zeus". Here is the corrected version: ;)

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

When we look at the past of computerdom, it's through a lens that's peculiar, because things have changed so much so fast.

That to me the 50 years since I've been in the computer field have gone so quickly that the past seems ever-present.

In the 60's and 70's, a lot of young people have started communes. And it was a combination of free love, which is a term you don't hear any more because it's taken for granted, and pot, and LSD, and idealism, and hope for a new kind of economy.

And that spirit of that age leaked into the computer world. There was a sense of possibility at the beginning that is different because we thought computing would be artisanal.

We did not imagine great monopolies. We thought the citizen programmer would be the leader.

When I say we I mean I, but of course I had a sense that I was sharing this with a lot of people.

We had visions of democratization, of citizen participation, to create vistas of possibility for artistic expression, and artistic expression in software. And software is an art form, though not generally recognized as such.

And because of Moore's Law, which has been stated to me not as Moore's Law, but just as a general principle: things will get faster and cheaper. We will be able to afford it. Right now a computer with a screen is $35,000. Tomorrow, who knows. It will be $100 some day.

Now is the time to start thinking about what will be the documents of the future.

As I would abstract it now, the two concepts were:

We can have parallel connections between visible documents. So you can have two pages with a connection saying "this sentence is connected to that paragraph" and see it as a visible strap or bridge.

And you can't do that yet. So that was one of my hypertext concepts.

And the other hypertext concept was being able to click on something and jump to it.

So as the hypertext concept developed and deteriorated over the years, only the jump link became popular in the hypertext systems of the 60's and the 70's, and then Tim Berners Lee created the World Wide Web, which was the sixth or seventh hypertext system on the internet.

People think it sprang from the brow of Zeus, in fact it was just a clean job that had the clout of CERN behind it. How to see the possibilities when there are so many things around you that are a certain way?

I don't know. The future is an unknown place. There are a lot of scary things about it.

What aspects you are going to approach? Are you going to go on thinking about leisure, or about the terrible problems that confront the world?

All I can say is: "Close your eyes, and think what might me."

My first software designs were largely done with my eyes closed. Thinking: "Now if I hit that key, what should happen? If it hit this key, what should happen?"

I was able to imagine -- they say this can't be done, but when my interfaces were built, they always felt the way I knew they would.

And the people at Xerox PARC said "That's never possible. You never know how it's going to be." But I did.

⬐ TheTedNelson

Thanks for the transcription, but please change one word--

>All I can say is: "Close your eyes, and think what might me."

That last word should be "be".

(Apparently I also created a Ycombinator account under the name "Ted Nelson", but they won't tell me the password.)