Ted Nelson demonstrates Xanadu Space

Too many great talks to mention, but if I had to pick one it would be Ted Nelson's few minutes of demonstration of Xanadu. Demonstration is lacking, but what he said about the concept/idea is what stuck with me. Deep and referential(?) content. ▶ this video

in “Ask HN: What's your favorite tech talk?” · View on HN

Everything you've mentioned completely misses the point - it is not just performance that stinks, it is not just javascript as a language that stinks - all these tools are incremental improvements that completely lack imagination. It is the platform itself - meant to display static text content, being coerced into some frankenstein that requires never-ending libraries and tooling to do what desktop apps did 20 years ago. It is hard to see any other world, so let me link you to a guy to whom it was obvious the web browsers stink decades ago. ▶ this video [link]

in “Gradual Programming” · View on HN

This video of his seems to give more of a demonstration of his alternative paradigm: ▶ this video It's really interesting to see, but in order for any of his idea to actually work you need to rethink the entire operating system it seems - not just the UI. He wants all content to have history, which would fundamentally break copy and paste (one of his points actually). The problem I see with that is you'd still have individual files (actual bits) on the hard drive, just they'd all have some meta content that describes it's origin. Or you'd need some sort of database file system (WinFS). I'd like to see technology trending more this guy's way, but the reality is that the technological challenges seem to be too great at the moment.

in “Ted Nelson: It All Went Wrong at Xerox PARC” · View on HN

this is a great supplement for this: ▶ this video a close up demo. His product Xanadu space, I hope it comes to light but the websites aren't looking too hot.

in “Content Management by Redefining the Document” · View on HN

And if you're into watching long videos of what the digital future was supposed to look like, Douglas Adams and Tom Baker made a documentary called Hyperland , and you can watch all 50 minutes of it here: [link] or if you want a shorter video, here's Ted Nelson with a short demo of Xanadu as it existed in 2008: ▶ this video

in “Pictures of the first GUIs from Xerox” · View on HN

For your perusal, here's a video of Ted demonstrating Xanadu: [0] (3min18sec to jump right to the demo) You can also browse the book he published describing the system, Literary Machines (1981) [1] -- it's a sprawling vision but I think where the parent sees overlap is in storing each text fragment as a singular entity and visualizing the links between two fragments. > A user may also make side-by-side connections of other types. On contemplating any two pieces of text, he may make a link between them. Thereafter, when he displays either piece of text, and asks to see the links, a link-symbol is displayed, and the other attached text — if he wishes to see it. > Naturally, making a marginal note consists of writing the note and hooking the link. The link facility gives us much more than the attachment of mere odds and ends. It permits fully non-sequential writing, or hypertext. BTW I really like the interface of just typing and moving my cursor around, and how easy it is to pick up a block of text and move it somewhere else. [0] ▶ this video [1] [link] A friend of mine is also building a memex [2](1945), as mentioned in the parent. His is a fairly radical DOS interface that he's been keying his thoughts into daily since the 80s, and it's great fun watching him try to remember something [3](2013): in about 5 or 6 keystrokes skipping across the graph of all notes, he's able to find that name on the tip of his tongue, and then hop to their phone number and the date they first met, the

in “Show HN: Structpad: notepad-database hybrid that helps you use abstract thinking” · View on HN