[117015] in Cypherpunks
Ted Nelson Returns
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Robert Hettinga)
Wed Aug 25 09:56:31 1999
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Date: Wed, 25 Aug 1999 07:34:59 -0400
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From: Robert Hettinga <rah@shipwright.com>
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Date: Tue, 24 Aug 1999 20:21:43 GMT
To: "DaveNet World" <davenet-world@scripting.com>
From: dave@scripting.com (DaveNet email)
Subject: Ted Nelson Returns
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>From Scripting News... It's DaveNet!
Released on 8/24/99; 8:22:26 PM PST
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***Good evening!
I just got back from the O'Reilly Open Source Convention in Monterey,
and I had a wonderful time. So many interesting things to say, my mind
is buzzing. There's been a change in the Internet software industry,
in a way this was a coming out party for it.
The O'Reilly conference was like an Apple or Microsoft developer
conference, but there was no Apple or Microsoft. Yes, each open
source community has a dictator, Larry Wall for Perl, Guido van
Rossum for Python, John Ousterhout for Tcl, Brian Behlendorf for
Apache, Eric Allman for Sendmail, Linus Torvalds for Linux. But the
fascinating thing about this conference is that the dictators only
got a slice of the time on stage, the rest of the work is done by
developers, and get this, they have a lot of independence.
Independence is what I wanted, sitting in the audience at Apple's
developer conference, year after year in the 80s and early 90s. A
chance to pitch my peers on a new idea. Ask the people who know me from
the Macintosh community, this is what I never liked about being
captive to a platform vendor. They do all the talking, you're
supposed to listen, and a lot of good ideas get flushed down the
toilet.
I'll certainly have more to say about this, but having just returned
from the conference, before eating dinner and retiring for the
evening, I wanted to scoop the rest of the news sites, because Ted
Nelson did something surprising and historic at the show, and very
few people tuned into it.
***Ted Nelson
I ran into Jon Udell, the veteran technical columnist for Byte.Com,
on Monday evening. He said he had just attended a very strange Birds of
the Feather meeting, led by Ted Nelson, one of my mentors in my
formative years as a software developer.
Nelson wrote a classic book that had huge influence on my generation
of software engineers and designers. The book was Computer
Lib/Dream Machines. For me, it was confirmation of what I suspected
-- that computers were part of the hippie revolution of the 60s and
70s. He said that computer power didn't have to reside exclusively in
the corporate world, that they could be used to foster free
expression and empower people where earlier forms of
communication, TV, radio, and print, were largely one-way,
hierarchic, and disempowering.
In those days these were radical ideas. Today, they're not as
radical, the web opens up the technology, but they're still out of the
box, not the norm. Real communication is rare, but not as much as it
was, thanks to computers and networks of computers.
Ted Nelson was and is the prototype for all computer visionaries. He
had the vision that computers could be an area where vision could be
applied. He described the strange world of hypertext that I
understood, in my youth, at an intuitive even visceral level.
***Nelson makes history
After writing his book, where he talked about a hypothetical system
called Xanadu, Nelson recruited a team of believers to actually
implement it. Now, twenty years later, and ten years after all work on
the system had ceased, Nelson and his band of believers have released
the source code to the Xanadu system. And my friend, Udell, had been
one of a small number of people present for the unveiling, the only
other reporter was from Upside. (I bet they have a longish lead time,
even for their website.)
This morning I asked Jon to write the story. He clearly got the scoop.
So we went to the machine room at the Doubletree where he wrote the
story and I accumulated historic background links on the Scripting
News home page. While we were doing this other people in the room
discovered what we were doing and started refreshing the Scripting
News home page. Then Jon posted his story and I linked to it:
http://www.byte.com/nntp/joncon?comment_id=1701
The Xanadu software can be downloaded from this site:
http://www.udanax.com/
Go get it!
***The golden age of journalism?
Even though Jon and I get our paychecks from different sources, we
worked together as I imagine people in the golden age of journalism
(whenever that was) worked together. Get the story and pull out all
the stops. Damn the torpedos. Whatever. It's an energizing
attitude.
Let's get the story out! I kept saying, in a good-natured way of
course. We were trying to beat the imaginary competition. And now,
many hours later, we still have the opportunity. The web moves
s-l-o-w-l-y at latching onto a news story that isn't fed to it via a big
corporate press release from a big corporate PR firm.
Eventually they'll get a clue and they'll be scouring the web for hot
new stories. You just watch, over the next week this very curious
story will percolate its way into your life. Remember where you heard
it first.
***Roger Gregory
Later in the day I talked with Roger Gregory, the lead developer of
Xanadu. I had met him a few times before, he's a good guy. I asked him if
the software really works. He said it does. I asked what his goal is. He
wants to see the ideas out there. I recognize the sentiment. I
promised to help.
You can help by spreading the word. Let people know that the Udanax
site exists (Udanax is Xanadu spelled backwards.) Let's crawl thru
this bit of history and see how they did.
***Antique software
I'm sure that Dan Bricklin's release of VisiCalc, and our release of
the antique outliners in July were not directly related to Nelson's
release of the Xanadu code, but it surely follows the trend.
Another way to think about it. Do we still listen to music created ten
years ago? We do. Should we look into software ideas that were
explored and then abandoned ten years ago? Of course.
Dave Winer
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Scripting News: <http://www.scripting.com/>
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Robert A. Hettinga <mailto: rah@ibuc.com>
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'
