4 ms·

That image is an absolutely fascinating historical artifact. He's describing (in a related paper) the essence of web sites in detail in 1965. It's difficult t

That image is an absolutely fascinating historical artifact. He's describing (in a related paper) the essence of web sites in detail in 1965. It's difficult to even imagine how few people were thinking of such things when they were so far removed everyday life and culture. Tim Berners-Lee I thought was much more well known for starting a revolution with the world wide web. I hate to say but the web seems a bit less of an insight when you know that Hypertext had already been so well established for almost 25 years. https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Nelson https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Nelson

dboreham 10y ago
I'm surprised that anyone could believe it required insight. Having lived through that period, nothing about it seemed insightful or surprising at the time. The only time I remember being surprised was when I saw a UPS truck with their URL painted on the side, in 1993. I remember thinking it was a couple of years ahead of time.
- bernardlunn 10y ago
  I recall somebody showing me the Internet in 1992 and I dismissed him as nuts - oops!
0x0 10y ago
Interesting wikipedia article, immediately brings to mind "worse is better" or "perfect is the enemy of good"
smacktoward 10y ago
He's actually describing the essence of something much more ambitious than the World Wide Web, if you can believe that. Ted Nelson's idea was/is called "Xanadu": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu The Xanadu vision is centered on a hypertext system, like the Web. But unlike the Web, it also includes such things as: - A mechanism for embedding live documents within other documents ("transclusion": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transclusion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transclusion) - Bidirectional links, that updated themselves automatically when the address of the linked document changed (see http://dubinko.info/blog/2009/11/22/how-xanadu-works/ http://dubinko.info/blog/2009/11/22/how-xanadu-works/) - An addressing system that goes beyond just documents to let you link directly to any range of content you wish ("tumblers": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tumbler_(Project_Xanadu) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tumbler_(Project_Xanadu)) - Automatic, redundant cross-network storage of all documents (a built-in Wayback Machine) - A micropayments system for content creators to sell access to what they create - Strong identity built in (a necessity if you want to also have payments built in) ... and much more. Xanadu is (in theory anyway) a much more sophisticated system than the Web is even today, never mind the Web as it was when TBL first designed it. Back then it was so much more crude than Xanadu as to barely merit comparison. But in a way that was TBL's genius, because, while the Web was much more crude than Xanadu architecturally, it was something that could actually be implemented with the early-'90s technology he had on hand. Xanadu, a much grander vision, was so much grander that it has defied fifty years' worth of efforts to implement it. (Back when Wired was worth reading, they ran a good piece on the state of those efforts circa 1995: https://www.wired.com/1995/06/xanadu/ https://www.wired.com/1995/06/xanadu/ It's still defying implementation today, more than twenty years later.) So we ended up with the Web we have, which kinda sorta works except for all the ways that it really doesn't. (Paying content creators, for instance.) Ted Nelson saw all those problems coming, all the way back in 1960, and he tried to come up with a system that would head them all off. He hasn't succeeded (not yet, anyway!), but you have to admire both the vision and the attempt.
- skrebbel 10y ago
  I favorited your comment so I can point people to it who have trouble grasping "worse is better". This is a much better example than clos vs scheme or linux vs microkernels.
  - TeMPOraL 10y ago
    It is a good example indeed. Though when dealing with people who reject "worse is better", remember that some people may not grasp the idea, but others may grasp it very well and just consider it a bad thing - a problem to work around.
    - skrebbel 10y ago
      Good point. I think the latter opinion is a very valid opinion to be had. And often it's also something you can agree to disagree about.
    - mbrock 10y ago
      I mentioned "Worse is Better" on this site a few days ago and received this comment: > "Worse is better" has nothing to do with it. Stop saying it every time anything you think is bad comes up. It's incredibly arrogant, the way people basically spam "worse is better" like they're in Twitch chat every time C, Unix, HTTP, or anything else that they perceive as imperfect comes up. It didn't occur to me that I was being offensive.
      - WhitneyLand 10y ago
        You're not being offensive. It's an important, non-obvious, under taught engineering principle. I understand the phenomenon he's describing and it's unfortunate he can't tell the difference.
- WhitneyLand 10y ago
  Great point on TBL. Maybe it's a matter of style rather than greatest insight. Many great thinkers and theorists have died before there work is fully realized, and some are just pragmatic geniuses like Edison who can see the path to making things happen. Both styles can offer so much to humanity, but I'd bet most entrepreneurs would go with Edison as a cofounder before Nelson.
bernardlunn 10y ago
The Xanadu site is worth reading. What a brilliant mind! The practical way to realize that vision, given the constraint of legacy content, could be graph databases.
mikepk 10y ago
The one that really blows my mind is Vannevar Bush -- July 1945 - "As we may think" - https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-may-think/303881/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-m... If you can look past the way he describes technologies of the day, there's an amazing amount of foresight in how access to information, its modalities and interconnectedness would become critically important.
Razengan 10y ago
> It's difficult to even imagine how few people were thinking of such things when they were so far removed everyday life and culture. I guess this is why you need imagination, and to not stifle it.

dboreham 10y ago

I'm surprised that anyone could believe it required insight. Having lived through that period, nothing about it seemed insightful or surprising at the time. The only time I remember being surprised was when I saw a UPS truck with their URL painted on the side, in 1993. I remember thinking it was a couple of years ahead of time.

bernardlunn 10y ago
I recall somebody showing me the Internet in 1992 and I dismissed him as nuts - oops!

0x0 10y ago

Interesting wikipedia article, immediately brings to mind "worse is better" or "perfect is the enemy of good"

smacktoward 10y ago

He's actually describing the essence of something much more ambitious than the World Wide Web, if you can believe that. Ted Nelson's idea was/is called "Xanadu": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu The Xanadu vision is centered on a hypertext system, like the Web. But unlike the Web, it also includes such things as: - A mechanism for embedding live documents within other documents ("transclusion": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transclusion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transclusion) - Bidirectional links, that updated themselves automatically when the address of the linked document changed (see http://dubinko.info/blog/2009/11/22/how-xanadu-works/ http://dubinko.info/blog/2009/11/22/how-xanadu-works/) - An addressing system that goes beyond just documents to let you link directly to any range of content you wish ("tumblers": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tumbler_(Project_Xanadu) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tumbler_(Project_Xanadu)) - Automatic, redundant cross-network storage of all documents (a built-in Wayback Machine) - A micropayments system for content creators to sell access to what they create - Strong identity built in (a necessity if you want to also have payments built in) ... and much more. Xanadu is (in theory anyway) a much more sophisticated system than the Web is even today, never mind the Web as it was when TBL first designed it. Back then it was so much more crude than Xanadu as to barely merit comparison. But in a way that was TBL's genius, because, while the Web was much more crude than Xanadu architecturally, it was something that could actually be implemented with the early-'90s technology he had on hand. Xanadu, a much grander vision, was so much grander that it has defied fifty years' worth of efforts to implement it. (Back when Wired was worth reading, they ran a good piece on the state of those efforts circa 1995: https://www.wired.com/1995/06/xanadu/ https://www.wired.com/1995/06/xanadu/ It's still defying implementation today, more than twenty years later.) So we ended up with the Web we have, which kinda sorta works except for all the ways that it really doesn't. (Paying content creators, for instance.) Ted Nelson saw all those problems coming, all the way back in 1960, and he tried to come up with a system that would head them all off. He hasn't succeeded (not yet, anyway!), but you have to admire both the vision and the attempt.

skrebbel 10y ago
I favorited your comment so I can point people to it who have trouble grasping "worse is better". This is a much better example than clos vs scheme or linux vs microkernels.
- TeMPOraL 10y ago
  It is a good example indeed. Though when dealing with people who reject "worse is better", remember that some people may not grasp the idea, but others may grasp it very well and just consider it a bad thing - a problem to work around.
  - skrebbel 10y ago
    Good point. I think the latter opinion is a very valid opinion to be had. And often it's also something you can agree to disagree about.
  - mbrock 10y ago
    I mentioned "Worse is Better" on this site a few days ago and received this comment: > "Worse is better" has nothing to do with it. Stop saying it every time anything you think is bad comes up. It's incredibly arrogant, the way people basically spam "worse is better" like they're in Twitch chat every time C, Unix, HTTP, or anything else that they perceive as imperfect comes up. It didn't occur to me that I was being offensive.
    - WhitneyLand 10y ago
      You're not being offensive. It's an important, non-obvious, under taught engineering principle. I understand the phenomenon he's describing and it's unfortunate he can't tell the difference.
WhitneyLand 10y ago
Great point on TBL. Maybe it's a matter of style rather than greatest insight. Many great thinkers and theorists have died before there work is fully realized, and some are just pragmatic geniuses like Edison who can see the path to making things happen. Both styles can offer so much to humanity, but I'd bet most entrepreneurs would go with Edison as a cofounder before Nelson.

bernardlunn 10y ago

The Xanadu site is worth reading. What a brilliant mind! The practical way to realize that vision, given the constraint of legacy content, could be graph databases.

mikepk 10y ago

The one that really blows my mind is Vannevar Bush -- July 1945 - "As we may think" - https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-may-think/303881/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-m... If you can look past the way he describes technologies of the day, there's an amazing amount of foresight in how access to information, its modalities and interconnectedness would become critically important.

Razengan 10y ago

> It's difficult to even imagine how few people were thinking of such things when they were so far removed everyday life and culture. I guess this is why you need imagination, and to not stifle it.