6 ms·

The Pattern Language of Project Xanadu

125 points by warpspin 3y ago

andyjohnson0 3y ago
Interesting piece - I hope it gets finished. Ted Nelson's books Computer Lib / Dream Machines, and Literary Machines are interesting and unconventional, but hard to find now. As for Xanadu, the classic Wired aricle The Curse of Xanadu [1] is still well worth a read. I'm not sure his vision was something that would have ever succeeded, but he at least posited an alternative to what we have now. [1] https://www.wired.com/1995/06/xanadu/ https://www.wired.com/1995/06/xanadu/ Edit to add that I've used the term "rabid prototyping" a few times over the years, and skimming that wired article reminds me where I stole it from.
- EdwardCoffin 3y ago
  Nelson has termed The Curse of Xanadu a hatchet job. There is discussion of that article, including links to archived versions of Nelson's responses to it at the c2.com page about it [1]. After an initial period of thinking Xanadu was vapourware, then feeling like the article was an uncharitable hatchet-job, I'm back to thinking it was vapourware. Nelson's responses seemed nit-picky at best, and when I downloaded the prototype/demo they'd made available I simply could not get it to work. [1] https://wiki.c2.com/?TheCurseOfXanadu https://wiki.c2.com/?TheCurseOfXanadu
  - kristopolous 3y ago
    I was personally building that demo and expressed these concerns at the time ten years ago. The other person on the project, who was like 17, convinced Ted that my, at the time, 20 years of software development somehow made me malicious and he asked me to not work on it. So he got what some sniping high school kid can make. Yes I'm still bitter about it. I don't make broken shit and that shit was broken. I still went to the demo/announcement at Chapman university (Woz was there, that was pretty cool) The reason Nelson's stuff hasn't gone anywhere is because he's a tyrant persuaded by fools and liars. I wish him the best regardless.
    - nonethewiser 3y ago
      Well that sounds like a major red flag
      - kristopolous 3y ago
        This isn't for lack of competent people with good intentions. The only times his ideas succeeded is when he wasn't on the project. Hypercard, WWW... His ideas were in the room but he was not. There's some deep lessons on how important therapy, interpersonal relationships and good management are there. This isn't to throw shade. Nobody remembers most brilliant inventors as successful CEOs because they usually aren't. It's a different skillset and you gotta know when to hand over the keys and to whom. It's not easy and I certainly don't profess expertise.
        specialist 3y ago
        FWIW, Duff Kurland's post-mortem of Nelson & Xanadu at Autodesk jives with your analysis.
        jazzyjackson 3y ago
        In the spirit of xanadu, would you mind posting a link? In searching your keywords, I did come across a font of wisdom in the form of "The Autodesk File: Bits of History, Words of Experience" which contains some chapters on Xanadu and Autodesk's relationship and acquisition - which I've managed to be wholly unaware of despite being a xanadu enthusiast (in so far as buying a couple of Ted's books and watching his videos on youtube counts :) http://www.worldcolleges.info/sites/default/files/formpig_autodesk_file_bits_of_history_words_of_experience_walker.pdf http://www.worldcolleges.info/sites/default/files/formpig_au... (see ToC, Xanadu on page 416 and elsewhere)
        deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
        specialist 3y ago
- nonethewiser 3y ago
  The fact that he coined the term hypertext and we saw a far less powerful version than he envisioned released by someone else does make me feel like there may be some unrealized potential, but that’s just naive speculation. Im not actually familiar with Xanadu.
- 7thaccount 3y ago
  The game "Kentucky Route Zero" has a chapter where you're in a cave with some crazy cave people doing computer research with antiquated hardware and it's called "Xanadu" lol. It took me awhile to catch the real world reference.
mikae1 3y ago
Ted Nelson himself has made a video series on Xanadu that is worth watching. The first episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hMKy52Intac https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hMKy52Intac
- spookthesunset 3y ago
  That is a pretty low number of views for something like this project.
Chiba-City 3y ago
[dead]
pr337h4m 3y ago
"If we wanted to dial up the Xanadu-esque visibility, we could work on showing previews of the whole page and directing people to specific pieces of text within it." It has been possible to link to specific pieces of text for a while now. For example: https://maggieappleton.com/xanadu-patterns#:~:text=If%20we%20wanted%20to%20dial%20up%20the%20Xanadu%2Desque%20visibility%2C%20we%20could%20work%20on%20showing%20previews%20of%20the%20whole%20page%20and%20directing%20people%20to%20specific%20pieces%20of%20text%20within%20it https://maggieappleton.com/xanadu-patterns#:~:text=If%20we%2....
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- mikewarot 3y ago
  We could also link directly to an office in a building by putting a ladder up to the window of a given office, but doing that completely ignores the structure of the building. If the text changes, the link breaks. If the server goes away, the link breaks. When you click the link, you no longer see the prior page, your context breaks. This is all about persistently enabling side by side viewing.
  - ta988 3y ago
    If the text changes you are not linking to the same thing. That sound like a really hard problem to handle if you are not in control of both sides.
    - cratermoon 3y ago
      > If the text changes you are not linking to the same thing If the literal text changes, and the link to the specific piece of text breaks because the link is just the words. But what if the change to the text is fixing a typo, or changing 'he' to 'they'? Nelson's vision was not about linking to text, it was about linking ideas. See https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/800197.806036 https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/800197.806036
jimmySixDOF 3y ago
For the last couple of years WonderOS has explored what a return to first principles OS design might look like today and there are definitely parallels to Xanadu with explicit callouts to Hypercard, Vannevar Bush and Engelbert if you explore the Lab Notes from the developer which are very thoughtful. ".... an itemized user environment. The item is an alternative boundary for our digital things which may let us interact with our devices more fluidly, and reflect our thinking more accurately, across our entire personal computing domain." https://wonderos.org/ https://wonderos.org/
- specialist 3y ago
  Really great, thanks for share. Appears very much in the spirit of Jef Raskin's The Humane Interface [2000] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Humane_Interface https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Humane_Interface https://www.amazon.com/Humane-Interface-Directions-Designing-Interactive/dp/0201379376 https://www.amazon.com/Humane-Interface-Directions-Designing... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jef_Raskin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jef_Raskin As u/chrisweekly alludes to elsethread, Obsidian is a bit like WonderOS. Could WonderOS be implemented as a "Obsidian as an operating system shell"? That'd be a "leaky abstraction", of course. But there are many precedents. Sorry, my pre-senile brain isn't quickly recalling the variety of experiments made to run on top of early Windows. Just a list of possibles: - Norton Commander was ported to Windows, right? - Assymetrix (Paul Allen's startup focused on actor based programming) did something - Wasn't there a desktop based on GEM? Aha. Here's a few more contenders: List of alternative shells for Windows https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_alternative_shells_for_Windows https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_alternative_shells_for... -- Anyway... WonderOS is terrific. So much work. It's definitely worthy of implementing a prototype. Please share any future updates. Thanks.
specialist 3y ago
I now have two reservations (open questions) about Project Xanadu. Centralization I believe but cannot yet prove that (durable) two-way links require some kind of central authority. I was very slow to appreciate that Nelson always intended for Project Xanadu to be centralized (authoritative?). Much like Facebook and AOL. Whole onto themselves. Walled gardens. Being a huge fan of the Xanadu vision (and never understanding the tech or stack), I was disappointed with the Web's one-way links. Now I see that we dodged a bullet. A suspect that an "open" Web and two-way links are mutually incompatible. Tumblers I've always wanted the transclusion feature. But I never fully grokked tumbers, Xanadu's fundamental data structure. I'd done a bit of work with SNMP MIB, which uses OIDs. Honestly, they sucked. But I couldn't think of anything better. Now I suspect the tumbler approach has been mooted by the advances in version control systems. I still want something like purple numbers or xpointers. Some kind of "light weight" tumbler. Not to say the tumbler data structure is itself heavy; just the over reliance on tumblers. So something like tumblers, as needed, when they're a value-add. So intra-document tumblers, not inter-document (eg directory, catalog). And definitely not for document management (workflows, version control). -- Thanks for reading. I write to understand. (And Xanadu is something I've struggled to understand for decades.) Feedback appreciated.
- thomastjeffery 3y ago
  Central authority is probably necessary if it is an authority on the final word. But I don't think that's as important as it sounds: what's really important is authority on the first word. A distributed system could use a web of trust where each user claims to be the originator of their work, via PGP signature. At that point "authority" is determined by what user identities you consider trustworthy by including them in your web of trust.
- kmeisthax 3y ago
  Xanadu transclusion would not work without central authorities either. Under current copyright law a web page with instructions that say "paste chapter 2, paragraph 33 of someone else's book here" is not automatically legal. It may be construed as a derivative work. Ted wanted to have copyright licensing and retrieval costs squared away so that when you opened an article with a quote from a book in it, you bought the article, you bought just the quote part of the book, something stitched them together into a document you could see, and everyone involved signed away their right to object to such an arrangement. I suspect the reason why Xanadu wants tumblers is purely because organizing the entire world's knowledge into a single hierarchical number line looks mathematically neat, even though "give me everything in between page 63 of Snow Crash to page 4 of The Lord of The Rings" is not a meaningful question that can be answered. And again, requires a central authority to number catalogs and books so that they can be referenced in this absolutely batshit insane way. IMHO the biggest problem with Xanadu isn't the technical underpinnings, or the disregard for decentralization. It's the UX design, or lack thereof. Having 10 different documents open with a bunch of transclusions and links drawn between them is at best extremely distracting and at worst not at all usable. There's a reason why "spiderweb of documents tied with red string" is a visual shorthand for conspiracy theories. And, again, all that requires a central authority to be putting in the work of tying red string in between all the documents, because nobody actually bothers doing that when writing documents unless threatened with academic or legal sanctions.
iamwil 3y ago
Does Maggie only write her essays as a draft to know if it's worth finishing based on feedback and view counts?
- cratermoon 3y ago
  She does something that can happen in a medium entirely unlike the printed word: she publishes what she has, marks it according to what state its in. https://maggieappleton.com/garden-history https://maggieappleton.com/garden-history
- silok 3y ago
  There is also a great in depth video on her Tana setup here: https://help.tana.inc/use-cases/tana-tour-with-maggie-appleton.html https://help.tana.inc/use-cases/tana-tour-with-maggie-applet...
DonHopkins 3y ago
HyperTIES was a hypermedia system designed by Ben Shneiderman at the University of Maryland Human Computer Interaction Lab. HyperTIES was certainly inspire by Ted's ideas, but a totally different design and focus on usability and easy browsing and authoring, and also (with the NeWS version) runtime extensibility and scriptability. Every HyperTIES article had a short definition summarizing its contents, and single clicking on a link would show that definition at the bottom of the screen without leaving the current context. Double clicking followed the link, and a stroking gesture left or right with a pie menu would open the link up in different windows. I've written about it before and transcluded the discussion and links into this "HyperTIES Discussions from Hacker News": https://donhopkins.medium.com/hyperties-discussions-from-hacker-news-937d156f0330 https://donhopkins.medium.com/hyperties-discussions-from-hac... >I linked to a brilliant video by Ted Nelson about his life’s work, and transcribed his most important points (it took him a lifetime to know what to say on the video, so it was well worth my time transcribing what he had to say, to save other people their own time), and then I went onto writing about how HyperTIES applied those ideas, and added concepts like pie menus, definition previews (sorely missing from the web: a way to read the definition of a link destination without actually following the link and losing your context), applets, emacs based authoring, etc. >It’s ironic that the web is still so primitive that I had to perform a lot of transclusion myself by hand in order to explain the idea of Transclusion that has been around so long, which Ted Nelson has always thought should be built in and automatic, not something you have to do laboriously by hand. Here's a video of HyperTIES and pie menus on NeWS: Ben Shneiderman shows the Hubble Space Telescope demo on a Sun Workstation running NeWS: https://youtu.be/1uyO-xUTt6Y?t=760 https://youtu.be/1uyO-xUTt6Y?t=760 HCIL Demo - HyperTIES Browsing https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fZi4gUjaGAM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fZi4gUjaGAM Don Hopkins and pie menus in ~ Spring 1989 on a Sun Workstation, running the NEWS operating system. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Fne3j7cWzg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Fne3j7cWzg
- chrisweekly 3y ago
  Maybe worth mentioning that Obsidian has transclusion and hover previews (and bidirectional links), with intuitive UX; I use these features every day. Granted, the indexed content is mostly just the static files on my local filesystem....
predictsoft 3y ago
Collaborated with Ted on Zigzag. Gzz - the open source finnish-developed Zigzag port - had incredible views like MindSundew. It was brilliant. The project failed when Ted wouldn't commit to going open source. It's a shame the project is dead now, because it solves problems like 2-way links. Using cursors which can 'sit' on a cell and disconnect when done.
- gardenfelder 3y ago
  https://gzigzag.sourceforge.net/ https://gzigzag.sourceforge.net/
predictsoft 3y ago
Loads of Ted stuff at https://archive.org/details/tednelsonarchive?page=2&sort=-week https://archive.org/details/tednelsonarchive?page=2&sort=-we...
teucris 3y ago
Great article so far, even if just examined for its prose: > One feels like the dinner guest who has stumbled into a raging martial argument over unwashed tea towels. You don't dare ask for context.
viksit 3y ago
surprisingly mobile wasn’t mentioned here. one of the biggest changes has been the shrinking of screen space along with higher resolutions. old paradigms don’t factor that in and thus continue to remain only of academic importance.
nologic01 3y ago
> The idea of the bi-directional link goes back to 1945 when Vannevar Bush dreamed up the Memex machine Ponder that. It does feel that in 2023 (= the remote future) the ambition to explore the full phase space of digital technology has flatlined in the face of oppressive "reality". False representations, enshittification, exploitation, dependency instead of bold visions of empowerment and augmentation. Yet future generations might revisit these visions, implement them in non-conforming software and reap the benefits that were denied to us. Thus documenting them in detail acts like these seed banks in the Arctic.

125 points by warpspin 3y ago

Interesting piece - I hope it gets finished. Ted Nelson's books Computer Lib / Dream Machines, and Literary Machines are interesting and unconventional, but hard to find now. As for Xanadu, the classic Wired aricle The Curse of Xanadu [1] is still well worth a read. I'm not sure his vision was something that would have ever succeeded, but he at least posited an alternative to what we have now. [1] https://www.wired.com/1995/06/xanadu/ https://www.wired.com/1995/06/xanadu/ Edit to add that I've used the term "rabid prototyping" a few times over the years, and skimming that wired article reminds me where I stole it from.

EdwardCoffin 3y ago
Nelson has termed The Curse of Xanadu a hatchet job. There is discussion of that article, including links to archived versions of Nelson's responses to it at the c2.com page about it [1]. After an initial period of thinking Xanadu was vapourware, then feeling like the article was an uncharitable hatchet-job, I'm back to thinking it was vapourware. Nelson's responses seemed nit-picky at best, and when I downloaded the prototype/demo they'd made available I simply could not get it to work. [1] https://wiki.c2.com/?TheCurseOfXanadu https://wiki.c2.com/?TheCurseOfXanadu
- kristopolous 3y ago
  I was personally building that demo and expressed these concerns at the time ten years ago. The other person on the project, who was like 17, convinced Ted that my, at the time, 20 years of software development somehow made me malicious and he asked me to not work on it. So he got what some sniping high school kid can make. Yes I'm still bitter about it. I don't make broken shit and that shit was broken. I still went to the demo/announcement at Chapman university (Woz was there, that was pretty cool) The reason Nelson's stuff hasn't gone anywhere is because he's a tyrant persuaded by fools and liars. I wish him the best regardless.
  - nonethewiser 3y ago
    Well that sounds like a major red flag
    - kristopolous 3y ago
      This isn't for lack of competent people with good intentions. The only times his ideas succeeded is when he wasn't on the project. Hypercard, WWW... His ideas were in the room but he was not. There's some deep lessons on how important therapy, interpersonal relationships and good management are there. This isn't to throw shade. Nobody remembers most brilliant inventors as successful CEOs because they usually aren't. It's a different skillset and you gotta know when to hand over the keys and to whom. It's not easy and I certainly don't profess expertise.
      - specialist 3y ago
        FWIW, Duff Kurland's post-mortem of Nelson & Xanadu at Autodesk jives with your analysis.
        jazzyjackson 3y ago
        In the spirit of xanadu, would you mind posting a link? In searching your keywords, I did come across a font of wisdom in the form of "The Autodesk File: Bits of History, Words of Experience" which contains some chapters on Xanadu and Autodesk's relationship and acquisition - which I've managed to be wholly unaware of despite being a xanadu enthusiast (in so far as buying a couple of Ted's books and watching his videos on youtube counts :) http://www.worldcolleges.info/sites/default/files/formpig_autodesk_file_bits_of_history_words_of_experience_walker.pdf http://www.worldcolleges.info/sites/default/files/formpig_au... (see ToC, Xanadu on page 416 and elsewhere)
        deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
        specialist 3y ago
nonethewiser 3y ago
The fact that he coined the term hypertext and we saw a far less powerful version than he envisioned released by someone else does make me feel like there may be some unrealized potential, but that’s just naive speculation. Im not actually familiar with Xanadu.
7thaccount 3y ago
The game "Kentucky Route Zero" has a chapter where you're in a cave with some crazy cave people doing computer research with antiquated hardware and it's called "Xanadu" lol. It took me awhile to catch the real world reference.

mikae1 3y ago

Ted Nelson himself has made a video series on Xanadu that is worth watching. The first episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hMKy52Intac https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hMKy52Intac

spookthesunset 3y ago
That is a pretty low number of views for something like this project.

Chiba-City 3y ago

[dead]

pr337h4m 3y ago

"If we wanted to dial up the Xanadu-esque visibility, we could work on showing previews of the whole page and directing people to specific pieces of text within it." It has been possible to link to specific pieces of text for a while now. For example: https://maggieappleton.com/xanadu-patterns#:~:text=If%20we%20wanted%20to%20dial%20up%20the%20Xanadu%2Desque%20visibility%2C%20we%20could%20work%20on%20showing%20previews%20of%20the%20whole%20page%20and%20directing%20people%20to%20specific%20pieces%20of%20text%20within%20it https://maggieappleton.com/xanadu-patterns#:~:text=If%20we%2....

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
mikewarot 3y ago
We could also link directly to an office in a building by putting a ladder up to the window of a given office, but doing that completely ignores the structure of the building. If the text changes, the link breaks. If the server goes away, the link breaks. When you click the link, you no longer see the prior page, your context breaks. This is all about persistently enabling side by side viewing.
- ta988 3y ago
  If the text changes you are not linking to the same thing. That sound like a really hard problem to handle if you are not in control of both sides.
  - cratermoon 3y ago
    > If the text changes you are not linking to the same thing If the literal text changes, and the link to the specific piece of text breaks because the link is just the words. But what if the change to the text is fixing a typo, or changing 'he' to 'they'? Nelson's vision was not about linking to text, it was about linking ideas. See https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/800197.806036 https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/800197.806036

jimmySixDOF 3y ago

For the last couple of years WonderOS has explored what a return to first principles OS design might look like today and there are definitely parallels to Xanadu with explicit callouts to Hypercard, Vannevar Bush and Engelbert if you explore the Lab Notes from the developer which are very thoughtful. ".... an itemized user environment. The item is an alternative boundary for our digital things which may let us interact with our devices more fluidly, and reflect our thinking more accurately, across our entire personal computing domain." https://wonderos.org/ https://wonderos.org/

specialist 3y ago
Really great, thanks for share. Appears very much in the spirit of Jef Raskin's The Humane Interface [2000] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Humane_Interface https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Humane_Interface https://www.amazon.com/Humane-Interface-Directions-Designing-Interactive/dp/0201379376 https://www.amazon.com/Humane-Interface-Directions-Designing... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jef_Raskin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jef_Raskin As u/chrisweekly alludes to elsethread, Obsidian is a bit like WonderOS. Could WonderOS be implemented as a "Obsidian as an operating system shell"? That'd be a "leaky abstraction", of course. But there are many precedents. Sorry, my pre-senile brain isn't quickly recalling the variety of experiments made to run on top of early Windows. Just a list of possibles: - Norton Commander was ported to Windows, right? - Assymetrix (Paul Allen's startup focused on actor based programming) did something - Wasn't there a desktop based on GEM? Aha. Here's a few more contenders: List of alternative shells for Windows https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_alternative_shells_for_Windows https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_alternative_shells_for... -- Anyway... WonderOS is terrific. So much work. It's definitely worthy of implementing a prototype. Please share any future updates. Thanks.

specialist 3y ago

I now have two reservations (open questions) about Project Xanadu. Centralization I believe but cannot yet prove that (durable) two-way links require some kind of central authority. I was very slow to appreciate that Nelson always intended for Project Xanadu to be centralized (authoritative?). Much like Facebook and AOL. Whole onto themselves. Walled gardens. Being a huge fan of the Xanadu vision (and never understanding the tech or stack), I was disappointed with the Web's one-way links. Now I see that we dodged a bullet. A suspect that an "open" Web and two-way links are mutually incompatible. Tumblers I've always wanted the transclusion feature. But I never fully grokked tumbers, Xanadu's fundamental data structure. I'd done a bit of work with SNMP MIB, which uses OIDs. Honestly, they sucked. But I couldn't think of anything better. Now I suspect the tumbler approach has been mooted by the advances in version control systems. I still want something like purple numbers or xpointers. Some kind of "light weight" tumbler. Not to say the tumbler data structure is itself heavy; just the over reliance on tumblers. So something like tumblers, as needed, when they're a value-add. So intra-document tumblers, not inter-document (eg directory, catalog). And definitely not for document management (workflows, version control). -- Thanks for reading. I write to understand. (And Xanadu is something I've struggled to understand for decades.) Feedback appreciated.

thomastjeffery 3y ago
Central authority is probably necessary if it is an authority on the final word. But I don't think that's as important as it sounds: what's really important is authority on the first word. A distributed system could use a web of trust where each user claims to be the originator of their work, via PGP signature. At that point "authority" is determined by what user identities you consider trustworthy by including them in your web of trust.
kmeisthax 3y ago
Xanadu transclusion would not work without central authorities either. Under current copyright law a web page with instructions that say "paste chapter 2, paragraph 33 of someone else's book here" is not automatically legal. It may be construed as a derivative work. Ted wanted to have copyright licensing and retrieval costs squared away so that when you opened an article with a quote from a book in it, you bought the article, you bought just the quote part of the book, something stitched them together into a document you could see, and everyone involved signed away their right to object to such an arrangement. I suspect the reason why Xanadu wants tumblers is purely because organizing the entire world's knowledge into a single hierarchical number line looks mathematically neat, even though "give me everything in between page 63 of Snow Crash to page 4 of The Lord of The Rings" is not a meaningful question that can be answered. And again, requires a central authority to number catalogs and books so that they can be referenced in this absolutely batshit insane way. IMHO the biggest problem with Xanadu isn't the technical underpinnings, or the disregard for decentralization. It's the UX design, or lack thereof. Having 10 different documents open with a bunch of transclusions and links drawn between them is at best extremely distracting and at worst not at all usable. There's a reason why "spiderweb of documents tied with red string" is a visual shorthand for conspiracy theories. And, again, all that requires a central authority to be putting in the work of tying red string in between all the documents, because nobody actually bothers doing that when writing documents unless threatened with academic or legal sanctions.

iamwil 3y ago

Does Maggie only write her essays as a draft to know if it's worth finishing based on feedback and view counts?

cratermoon 3y ago
She does something that can happen in a medium entirely unlike the printed word: she publishes what she has, marks it according to what state its in. https://maggieappleton.com/garden-history https://maggieappleton.com/garden-history
silok 3y ago
There is also a great in depth video on her Tana setup here: https://help.tana.inc/use-cases/tana-tour-with-maggie-appleton.html https://help.tana.inc/use-cases/tana-tour-with-maggie-applet...

DonHopkins 3y ago

HyperTIES was a hypermedia system designed by Ben Shneiderman at the University of Maryland Human Computer Interaction Lab. HyperTIES was certainly inspire by Ted's ideas, but a totally different design and focus on usability and easy browsing and authoring, and also (with the NeWS version) runtime extensibility and scriptability. Every HyperTIES article had a short definition summarizing its contents, and single clicking on a link would show that definition at the bottom of the screen without leaving the current context. Double clicking followed the link, and a stroking gesture left or right with a pie menu would open the link up in different windows. I've written about it before and transcluded the discussion and links into this "HyperTIES Discussions from Hacker News": https://donhopkins.medium.com/hyperties-discussions-from-hacker-news-937d156f0330 https://donhopkins.medium.com/hyperties-discussions-from-hac... >I linked to a brilliant video by Ted Nelson about his life’s work, and transcribed his most important points (it took him a lifetime to know what to say on the video, so it was well worth my time transcribing what he had to say, to save other people their own time), and then I went onto writing about how HyperTIES applied those ideas, and added concepts like pie menus, definition previews (sorely missing from the web: a way to read the definition of a link destination without actually following the link and losing your context), applets, emacs based authoring, etc. >It’s ironic that the web is still so primitive that I had to perform a lot of transclusion myself by hand in order to explain the idea of Transclusion that has been around so long, which Ted Nelson has always thought should be built in and automatic, not something you have to do laboriously by hand. Here's a video of HyperTIES and pie menus on NeWS: Ben Shneiderman shows the Hubble Space Telescope demo on a Sun Workstation running NeWS: https://youtu.be/1uyO-xUTt6Y?t=760 https://youtu.be/1uyO-xUTt6Y?t=760 HCIL Demo - HyperTIES Browsing https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fZi4gUjaGAM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fZi4gUjaGAM Don Hopkins and pie menus in ~ Spring 1989 on a Sun Workstation, running the NEWS operating system. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Fne3j7cWzg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Fne3j7cWzg

chrisweekly 3y ago
Maybe worth mentioning that Obsidian has transclusion and hover previews (and bidirectional links), with intuitive UX; I use these features every day. Granted, the indexed content is mostly just the static files on my local filesystem....

predictsoft 3y ago

Collaborated with Ted on Zigzag. Gzz - the open source finnish-developed Zigzag port - had incredible views like MindSundew. It was brilliant. The project failed when Ted wouldn't commit to going open source. It's a shame the project is dead now, because it solves problems like 2-way links. Using cursors which can 'sit' on a cell and disconnect when done.

gardenfelder 3y ago
https://gzigzag.sourceforge.net/ https://gzigzag.sourceforge.net/

predictsoft 3y ago

Loads of Ted stuff at https://archive.org/details/tednelsonarchive?page=2&sort=-week https://archive.org/details/tednelsonarchive?page=2&sort=-we...

teucris 3y ago

Great article so far, even if just examined for its prose: > One feels like the dinner guest who has stumbled into a raging martial argument over unwashed tea towels. You don't dare ask for context.

viksit 3y ago

surprisingly mobile wasn’t mentioned here. one of the biggest changes has been the shrinking of screen space along with higher resolutions. old paradigms don’t factor that in and thus continue to remain only of academic importance.

nologic01 3y ago

> The idea of the bi-directional link goes back to 1945 when Vannevar Bush dreamed up the Memex machine Ponder that. It does feel that in 2023 (= the remote future) the ambition to explore the full phase space of digital technology has flatlined in the face of oppressive "reality". False representations, enshittification, exploitation, dependency instead of bold visions of empowerment and augmentation. Yet future generations might revisit these visions, implement them in non-conforming software and reap the benefits that were denied to us. Thus documenting them in detail acts like these seed banks in the Arctic.