5 ms·
A File Structure for the Complex, the Changing, and the Indeterminate [pdf]
- Smaug123 6y agoAndy Matuschak pointed out on Twitter that this paper from 1965 has a jaw-droppingly beautiful title, but then I read it and it's actually fascinating. It's an exploration from the idea of the memex, as imagined before personal computers were a thing, towards what kind of structure is sufficiently general to capture the vast, sprawling, inconstant domains of thought.
- lainga 6y agoAre you familiar with the author or does the Tweet mention him? He would famously go on to spend a large part of his career attempting to implement something roughly like this paper describes, and inspired by the Memex. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Nelson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Nelson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu
- noir_lord 6y agoI love these old comp-sci papers. Makes you wonder what amazing ideas are buried in them that where ahead of their time then but aren't now. So much of what we use today came out of academia a couple of decades ago - I've made the joke before that if you want to see what the front-end folks will be doing next year look what was the hot research 25 years ago.
- whytaka 6y agoDo you have an example of this?
- ggrrhh_ta 6y agoBhuyan L.N.'s 1984 paper to be concrete, but in general, Valerio M.'s papers, Lamport papers, some old results from Knuth...
- whytaka 6y agoThanks.
- cratermoon 6y ago- D. L. Parnas, On the Criteria To Be Used in Decomposing Systems into Modules 1972 - Liskov, B Programming With Abstract Data Types 1974 - ______ A behavioral notion of subtyping, 1994 - Waldo et al, A note on distributed computing, 1997
- whytaka 6y agoThanks.
- macintux 6y agoBret Victor’s classic talk “The Future of Programming” is worth watching on this subject. http://worrydream.com/dbx/ http://worrydream.com/dbx/
- whytaka 6y agoThanks.
- lalaithion 6y ago2003: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/a-user-centred-approach-to-functions-in-excel/ https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/a-user-... 2021: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/blog/lambda-the-ultimatae-excel-worksheet-function/ https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/blog/lambda-the-ult... Not quite 25 years, but it was a paper published by microsoft research, about a microsoft project, that took 18 years to be implemented.
- ggrrhh_ta 6y agoI understand the author must be the "Ted Nelson" (https://www.youtube.com/user/TheTedNelson https://www.youtube.com/user/TheTedNelson). He has always been such a visionary. Such an immensely articulate person. His youtube channel is full of gems; his Computer for Cynics' series is great. His chapter on How Bitcoin Actually works (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3CMucDjJQ4E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3CMucDjJQ4E) is a "must see" for journalists and people that come from non technological domains - still current and at the same time visionary for a video recorded in 2014 about Bitcoin.
- EngrRavi 6y agoOk, so that's how an emacs buffer works.
- polytely 6y agoI'm fascinated by these sort of ideas about how to structure data for personal archives, but most of the stuff I've read about it is quite old. Are there any recent innovations or ideas in this area or has everything basically been explored?
- cratermoon 6y agoNo.
- cratermoon 6y agoI see something of this in the plumbing of git. "pies of entries and lists? By patching techniques, of course. Variant entries and lists can take virtually no space, being modification data plus pointers to the original. When a modified version of a list or entry is created, the machine patches the original with the changes necessary to make the modified version"
- gumby 6y agodang, please add (1965) to the title. Ted really is a visionary.
- gnzoidberg 6y agoAny paper with an Edward Gorey reference gets my vote.
- stevesimmons 6y ago"A small computer with mass memory and video-type display now costs $37,000" And since $1 in 1965 is worth $7.27 today, that $37,000 is really $270,000. Incidentally, I found https://jcmit.net/memoryprice.htm https://jcmit.net/memoryprice.htm for the cost of memory over time. In 1965, memory cost $2.6m per megabyte. Today it is $0.003!