HN Theater @HNTheaterMonth

⬐ Rumperuu

Personal computing and hypertext pioneer Ted Nelson reflects on his life's work and the ways computer history could have turned out very differently.

From the video desc.:

‘What I want known about my ideals and work over the years. How a very bad career plan led to discoveries, hopes and adventures. In some ways this is an alternative history of personal computing and world hypertext.’

Yes! There are no serious moves. Nothing in life is really serious, not even death.

But I feel like I need to reach some impossible state of ego integrity or ego death or something to actually live by that line of thinking.

So instead, I'm moved by fear and contrived seriousness. I want to be successful, or at least successful enough that one day I can spend my 80s seriously and nostalgically navel-gazing to bewildered viewers outside of my social reality, convinced that I am extremely special. [0]

:3

0: https://youtu.be/mmfjM-SGlGs

Haven't watched this interview, but this video of his is very good: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mmfjM-SGlGs

⬐ justin_

Ted's Youtube channel is a treasure. Candid and honest, but interesting and insightful.

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]

⬐ keithpeter

"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.

⬐ kawera

Thanks for posting this. For those interested, I would also recommend Howard Rheingold's video "Ted Nelson and Doug Engelbart come to dinner" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zCLCIw-HSJc

⬐ tosh

Ted's whole Youtube account is a treasure trove.

Incredible how some of the videos only have a couple of hundred views. More people need to see and listen.

https://www.youtube.com/user/TheTedNelson

⬐ tosh

""" "Silicon Valley Story" — a Very Short Romantic Comedy by Ted Nelson

A playful story about the microcircuitry of love, with Ted Nelson as an absentminded genius, featuring Doug Engelbart as Ted's father and Stewart Brand as the villainous CEO.

Closing song: "Information Flow", sung by Donna Spitzer and the auteur. """

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AXlyMrv8_dQ

⬐ ericjang

He mentions at 14:00 the "Dark Brown" experience, where he went to Brown University to make the HyperText system. He says "he had to work under a torrent of insults from someone who he thought was his friend and HyperText got dumbed down."

Though he doesn't mention who the "friend" was, is it the much-beloved (by Brown CS dept) Andy van Dam (who is credited as the co-designer of HES)?

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

⬐ subsidd

I am probably too young and uninformed but would love if somebody could enlighten me more about "Ted Nelson" because after watching his videos and reading about him on wikipedia and from other sources, I find a little difficult to understand the fan following he has in the form of comments on his videos or in this thread.

In the video he claims to be the first one to imagine a lot of things in his era, very novel to information science which unfortunately he hasn't been able to materialize yet and from the tone he claims all of the above makes me a little uncomfortably skeptical. IMO, nobody is ever first to imagine anything, historically great ideas have simultaneously popped up into quite a few heads and claiming that you were the first doesn't show a healthy state of outlook.

⬐ ted_dunning

Well, Ted Nelson has better standing for claiming to have envisioned what the internet could have become before anyone else than most people.

What he saw isn't what we have built, but it was prescient. And remember, he was talking about these things when just barely after it was sensible to consider whether a humans or a computer would complete a computation sooner (Ulam versus von Neuman in analyzing thermonuclear processes, for instance).

⬐ charlesism

Ted Nelson can come across as arrogant and pretentious. That doesn't mean he's not right more often than he is wrong.

Considering he's worked in tech longer than most of us have even been alive (and much longer, for most of us), it's disappointing to see people discount him here.

Most of use should be so lucky as to achieve half of what he did: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Nelson

⬐ readams

You might think of him as analogous to Alfred Russel Wallace and evolution.

⬐ jslabovitz

I haven't watched the video yet, but I can provide some insight. I spent time with Ted in late 1992 and early 1993, when I lived in San Francisco, and Ted lived just north of the Golden Gate on a houseboat in Sausalito. This was just months before the web 'went public.' (That fall, I was hired by O'Reilly & Associates to help build Global Network Navigator, the first commercial website; we launched in October 1993.)

Ted could be grumpy and arrogant, but he was also incredibly insightful and visionary in his thinking. It seemed to me that he felt strongly the pulse of the future, and was passionate and driven to build the very best version of that future. Like most visionaries, his perfectionism was a result of careful consideration and system design and an inability to settle for less. It's hard to understand now, but he'd put enormous effort into designing a coherent hypertext system that supported not just simple one-way linking (what we've done for 25 years with HTML/HTTP), but bidirectional linking, including an addressing scheme that could 'transclude' (he liked neologisms) content from any other author, while giving full credit, and even royalties. (If you can find it, read his book Computer Lib / Dream Machines.)

He'd been seriously thinking about this stuff since the mid-1960s, and there in the early 1990s, had just started getting traction with a team of people who shared his views. (I was one of them, though a very minor character.) We all knew it was hard, and still quite unclear exactly how all this magic was going to work. Xanadu (Ted's name for his system) had been started and stopped and restarted already a few times. But hanging out on his houseboat in Sausalito, talking data structures and user interfaces with Ted and his gang of incredible programmers, chatting with luminaries who strolled in (I remember Doug Engelbart, inventor of the mouse, coming over one sunny afternoon), was an incredibly heady atmosphere. No one except Ted knew if it would actually work, but it sure was fun to try.

Yet the web lurked just around the corner. On a whim, that summer of 1993 I attended some networking exposition (Interop?) in the city. While cruising the aisles, I ran into the O'Reilly folks and their big color X terminal running an early Mosaic browser, showing a very early World Wide Web. Although I didn't get the details, I immediately understood what they were showing: this was hypertext that worked. While Ted's system was an amazing promise, the Web was clearly the reality that would, in its own pragmatic, hacky way, be the way forward. (I believe that Tim Berners-Lee, inventor/enabler of the web-as-we-know-it, has cited Nelson as an major influence.)

So look at Ted and his work like a musician's musician, unsung and unrecognized beyond the inner circle. Or like Tesla, a great inventor of impossibly amazing projects.

I'm glad Ted's still out there, still inventing, even if Xanadu is but a dream.

⬐ nerdponx

Yesterday's visionary is today's crank.

⬐ subsidd

That's not an useful or informed reply.

⬐ None

None

⬐ dramm

No, but it does make you think the poster was previously a visionary.

⬐ scottLobster

Well as far as his outlook is concerned I wouldn't call it healthy simply due to his bitterness. While he may have fallen short of towering objectives, the vast majority of people go through life never achieving his level of influence. I would think he should be more grateful for the role he was able to play. It may not have been the part he wanted but at least he got to be on the stage.

As for why he has a fanbase, having never heard of Ted Nelson before this video I'd say it's because whether he was the absolute "first" or not he was clearly very early to the party and his intuition correctly led him to many of the technical paradigms we now use daily. For someone to track so closely to the march of progress implies there's something worth listening to. Perhaps some pattern to his beliefs or behavior that might help point toward where things are going.

Speaking of patterns, I can't help but notice that his repeating problem is one afflicting many academics: lack of practicality. He mentions this to a degree in his retrospective where he admits he "stuck to his guns" instead of jumping on the next big thing because he thought, sometimes rightfully, that his designs were "better". The problem there is he was using his definition of "better", not the market's. For someone who wanted his own company he seems to have made little study of the act of actually running one.

He also mentions his desire from an early age to be a "generalist great intellectual", and looked down on his friends/colleagues for specializing after college. Even at the end of the video he mentions he's "not a programmer, but a director/producer of programmers". He's also clearly a zealous idealist. All of this reflects a mind perfectly geared to creating great new systems and paradigms that are truly revolutionary.. and absolutely horrible at fitting them into existing systems, or of convincing the unenlightened to adopt them.

Why do many systems of the internet emulate paper when they are capable of so much more? (A notion he brings up and sneers at in disgust) Because people who never used the internet and knew crap about technology knew paper. That was their bridge, conscious or subconscious, to understanding the internet. He seems to greatly overestimate the intellectual rigor present in the average person. For all his foresight, I wonder if he foresaw people leaving voicemail to let their coworkers know they had just send them email. That was actually a thing in the 90s...

⬐ revelation

This paper thing sure stuck with him, then you see this video of him demoing what is less than a demo on some XP:

https://youtu.be/1yLNGUeHapA?t=3m16s

And it's fricking A4 paper in a black 3D void that they call "XanaduSpace". I mean, let's just stop here. Who are we ever going to call a crank if not this guy?

Apparently he has been claiming to be original HyperText inventor all the way back to 1965. He's like that guy claiming he invented email.

⬐ scottLobster

I see nothing wrong with that demo, in fact it's probably as revolutionary as he thinks. It effectively makes bibliographies obsolete and eliminates the overheard in tracking down sources. Add in his idea of micro-payments for quotations and you have viable financial incentive for people to publish work to Xanadu space. The whole 3D-space thing is a bit gimmicky, but could be useful in some contexts. It'd be great for academics/wikipedia/people who give a shit.

The idea of enabling branching knowledge paths for everything from media to education is also intriguing.

The issue when it comes to mass adoption is that most people don't give a shit. You need only look at comments on any news site to see the vast swath of people who read the headline and nothing else. They won't read the article, let alone care about sources, no matter how easy they are to track down, although Xanadu would seem to lessen the possible excuses.

There's also the issue that people are used to "free" ad-supported content, micropayments have yet to catch on even when offered. I'm still the only person I know who's even heard of Google Contributor.

And it's quite possible he was the first to come up with the concept of HyperText. He never claimed to have coded HTTP, merely to have invented the concept. True or not, he was clearly there on the ground floor. I'll give him the benefit of the doubt. Whether he was the first or not doesn't really matter anyway, I'm more interested in his ideas and practices than his historical claims.

⬐ jhanschoo

It seems to me that with some marketing polish and some work for interoperability with the test of the WWW, Xanadu is perfect as a blogging or wiki platform.

⬐ juancampa

Wondering if he wrote this using Project Xanadu [1]

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu

⬐ sktrdie

Although he's done a lot for the Computer Science field, his pretentiousness is way over the top in this video and makes it less enjoyable to watch.

He could've outlined and explained his life story without saying "which I was first at inventing" or "I'm always first" or "I invented all these things" every 5 minutes.

Not to degrade his inventions of course - I would not care whether, say, Einstein was pretentious; it's his output that mattered.

But it feels less authentic when you're constantly rubbing it in people's faces.

Ted's sitting across from me right now! He says this article is old, and wanted to link to a video he recently made talking about his life and work, if anyone's interested: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mmfjM-SGlGs

We're also hosting an ongoing archival project of his junk mail that he's saved over the years: https://archive.org/details/tednelsonjunkmail (more details on the project: http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/5206 )

⬐ hossbeast

What does he have to say about cryptocurrencies, and the impending possibility that they might make micropayments a reality?

⬐ sillysaurus3

In fairness, cryptocurrencies have become more like gold than pennies. I recently proposed someone pay me in Bitcoin for services rendered, and it immediately seemed like a bad idea. PayPal or Venmo is still where it's at, for better or worse.

As far as "impending," well... Maybe if the lightning network proposal happens. Maybe.

The other currencies do matter, but Bitcoin remains the granddaddy and has immense inertia. It's hard enough for normal people to acquire Bitcoin, let alone any of the others.

⬐ hossbeast

Yeah, lightning is what I had in mind. Next year is my guess, with SegWit now in place.