7 ms·

Ted Nelson: It All Went Wrong at Xerox PARC

127 points by mgunes 13y ago

agumonkey 13y ago
I wonder if meant 'PARC User Interface aka POOEY' ?
rst 13y ago
Interesting thoughts; it would be nice to have a transcript. (It's somewhat ironic in the light of the content that while he's clearly reading a prepared text, it's presented in a way that makes excerpting or reorganization nearly impossible; worse even than files of plain text.)
- joe_the_user 13y ago
  Good call! Naturally, the prophet of the absolute, ultimate hypertext system puts out his ideas without even using ordinary text. We can assume that in Nelson's world, the system would transcribe and add to his words without him making the effort. (Edit: Despite the fact that Nelson is periodically looking off screen, there's reason to think he's reading from a prepared text. He quite possibly is reading from bullet points that he is used translating into statements - something I think many experienced public speakers do). Nelson is a fascinating character for his idealism concerning what computer interfaces should do. It's easy to see how that idealism might be serving as screen hiding the inherent barriers to such a system ever existing - especially, as technology allows one to give data more structures and inter-relations, there's actually no guarantee that the tools for dealing with those structures will keep with their complexity.
- watershawl 13y ago
  Youtube videos are auto-transcribed by Google for closed-captioning purposes. You can view the closed caption transcript by clicking the "Transcript" icon under the video. It's in between the "Add to" and "Statistics" icon unless specifically removed by the uploader. I especially like the last line: 13:52in order to sell printers they threw away the universe 13:58thank you
joe_the_user 13y ago
This is a fascinating discussion. It is especially worth watching to the end. Among other things, it seems like one could apply this argument to claim that the-web-as-interface is strictly better than the PARC-style GUI. It well known, however, that Nelson objects to the web nearly as much as he objects to the "PUI". And this is because web is at best as a leaky simulation of multi-part document rather than a real implementation of Nelson's Xanadu vision (articulated in the 60's). The thing is the Xanadu vision, multi-part documents with living links (distributed version control, permissions and etc) is more or less impractical to implement fully. On the other hand, the point that a single-person word-processor certainly could use a series of piece a-la the pre-computer method he describes. As Nelson mentions, one of the key ways the PUI was able to dominate was by organizing a variety of operations with a single metaphor. I suspect that Nelson is underestimating how important that is for making computers accessible to people.
- gum_ina_package 13y ago
  This video of his seems to give more of a demonstration of his alternative paradigm: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=En_2T7KH6RA http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=En_2T7KH6RA 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.
- dclowd9901 13y ago
  I'm a software developer, and I (like many) prefer not to work in VIM. If that's not damning to the idea that people would embrace abstract interfaces -- that is, a computer professional preferring a more familiar metaphor -- then I don't know what is.
- smrtinsert 13y ago
  We're getting closer to that vision thanks to ideas like Android Intents. I don't know how many times I've been amazed and how smoothly applications share and communicate data among them without being specifically designed to collaborate.
miket 13y ago
Is he sitting on a church pew?
- jasonwatkinspdx 13y ago
  Looks like the Internet Archive headquarters: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:The_main_hall_at_Internet_Archive_(2013).jpg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:The_main_hall_at_Internet_...
  - AlecEifel 13y ago
    Nice find! I was wondering the same thing.
  - watershawl 13y ago
    I thought the same thing after seeing their call for t-shirts for pillow covers.
  - Redoubts 13y ago
    Well, apparently the Archive HQ is a former Christian Science church.
fidotron 13y ago
Oh dear. This is a Jef Raskin-esque rant of an old man that's realised they aren't going to be nearly as influential in the history books as they once thought. I would hope never to have to do the same, either from delusions in the present or anger at the end! This business of underplaying or demeaning the importance of the use of icons, fonts, or familiar metaphors in favour of some abstract notion of an interface that no one has succeeded in ever implementing, not least because no one can agree on what it should be, is a running theme. This is often accompanied by banging on about the importance of what are really just clerical operations. PARC, like any office of a large organisation, was invariably subject to revisionist history, office politics and all sorts of other nonsense, but attempting to deny the fact they did produce the direction for our last 30 years (and possibly into the near future) is ludicrous, much as a similar rant against Bell Labs would be misguided. Most specifically he glosses over the fact that the nature of applications in the environments at PARC had far blurrier lines around the edges than say iOS apps do. They had things like OLE, which the web is clearly trending to recreate in the form of web components because though implementations have sucked the idea itself makes sense to people. Paying close attention to the ideas from PARC you can see that the real philosophical difference is Nelson is closer to the idea of an all ruling single document format - whereas the vision PARC believed in was an all ruling single code format. Once more the parallel to the evolution of the web is clear, in that what began as a way to distribute documents is morphing, slowly, into a method for distributing rich code objects.
- AlecEifel 13y ago
  Agree 100% -- I couldn't have said it better! In my professional life, I have often met consultant types with super vague technical ideas that (surprise!) they were secretly working on implementing. They woudn't release anything because they fear being criticized. The GUI was a big deal and still is to this day. Xerox PARC did change the world. Ted Nelson? Not so much...
  - melloclello 13y ago
    It's not about who did and who didn't change the world, but the fact that the people who did change the world are not above (some pretty ruthless) criticism.
AlecEifel 13y ago
Old man, bitter that Alan Key, Steve Jobs & Xerox PARC got more money & credit than he ever did. Who the hell cares about his gripes? The "legendary story" was generally corroborated by all parties involved. Ted Nelson has yet to admit missing the boat by never being able to release anything in over 40 years. He is a super-consultant & inverse opposite of what Y&C stands for. A great visionary with zero implementation skill. Time to die.
- __pThrow 13y ago
  That's really ugly. I can understand why you felt the need to create a new throwaway to hide behind.
- melloclello 13y ago
  If you'd like to read more inflammatory screeds from idealists who've never released anything, I highly recommend the blog of Stanislav Datsovskiy[1], in which he passionately elucidates the finer details of what might constitute a non-horrible operating system/programming environment[2]. > "I sometimes find myself wondering if the invention of the high-level compiler was a fundamental and grave (if perhaps inevitable) mistake, not unlike, say, leaded gasoline."[3] As I gather, he's spent about the last five years or so trying to build a LISP machine from scratch on an FPGA. (PS I see from your profile that you're an iOS dev too... I would think that anybody who writes Objective-C for a living would typically sustain an intense and burning hatred for the state of contemporary programming, and be otherwise eternally fascinated by any proposed alternatives. How do you do it?) [1] http://www.loper-os.org/?p=8 http://www.loper-os.org/?p=8 [2] http://www.loper-os.org/?p=284 http://www.loper-os.org/?p=284 [3] http://www.loper-os.org/?p=55 http://www.loper-os.org/?p=55
- pekk 13y ago
  Telling an old man it's "time to die" because you idolize PARC or Jobs or something is completely, unacceptably rude.
  - Gigablah 13y ago
    Sociopathic, even.
rch 13y ago
I enjoy Ted Nelson when he's sharing historical context, but I hope he realizes that most of the salient points he is making are perfectly obvious to rather a lot of technical people. Affecting meaningful change or progress will take more than impassioned pontification.
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michaelwww 13y ago
As user jasonwatkinspdx pointed out, he's doing this at the Internet Archive headquarters. He's probably for purpose of recording an oral history. It appears that rather than taking the route of singing the glories of great men past, he figures there's enough of that, so he's giving an alternate view that he calls "computers for cynics" to record some of the less glorious aspects of personal computer history. I think he's made the right choice, although if you weren't aware of the context he would seem to be a bit of a crank. Edit: If you watch "Computers for Cynics 4 - The Dance of Apple and Microsoft [1] he's much less cranky and sings praises to Steve Jobs in a way that made me re-evaluate my opinion of Jobs. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_xL19f48m9U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_xL19f48m9U
- 1amzave 13y ago
  Hmm -- I watched "Computers for Cynics 1 - The Nightmare of Files and Directories" (which I won't bother linking to, because frankly I can't recommend watching it), since file and storage systems are a topic of some interest to me. It was similarly cranky, and littered with statements that were either poor descriptions of the concepts they aimed to explain, highly misleading, or just flat-out incorrect (if he has any idea how filesystems actually work, he's doing a damn good job hiding it).
endlessvoid94 13y ago
It's very difficult to get past his tone in this video -- he seems angry and disgruntled. I'm not saying he doesn't have valid criticisms, but he's not making it very easy to sympathize with him.
nickbauman 13y ago
Is it just me or is Ted's vision basically OpenDoc? http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDoc http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDoc
- DougMerritt 13y ago
  Not even a little bit close -- nor can you pick up what his vision has been from that video.
leoc 13y ago
It's Ted Nelson rattling through some of his computer-history notes on camera. So it's good material, but it's much better presented in his enjoyable and reasonably-priced book /Geeks Bearing Gifts/ http://www.lulu.com/shop/ted-nelson/geeks-bearing-gifts/paperback/product-4312837.html http://www.lulu.com/shop/ted-nelson/geeks-bearing-gifts/pape... . I noted a couple of apparent mistakes: at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c6SUOeAqOjU#t=4m26s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c6SUOeAqOjU#t=4m26s Nelson says that Xerox paid Jobs to look at the PARC work, while AFAIK Apple in fact paid Xerox, in pre-IPO Apple stock. He also suggested that Xerox tried to bring in Jobs, when it seems to have been Apple who made the approach (at the instigation of Jef Raskin at Apple). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c6SUOeAqOjU#t=2m15s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c6SUOeAqOjU#t=2m15s is misleading. PARC was more-or-less forbidden to buy a DEC PDP-10, which would have reflected badly on the competing machines from Xerox's new acquisition Scientific Data Systems, so PARC built a PDP-10 clone (the MAXC) in-house for their own use. That had very little to do with why they later designed and built the Altos: there was nothing remotely similar to an Alto out there that they could have bought (Nelson knows this).
eliwjones 13y ago
His point about the bastardization of "cut and paste" is very important in my opinion. Hell, he ends with this.. Bringing a complex tangle of code to heel becomes tractable if you just print it out, cut it up, and rearrange the parts. It would be fairly sexy to be able to do this on your computer... granted, you need a lot of screen space to pull it off. Oh, and I'm ignorant of Ted Nelson.... But it seems fairly obvious these talks are meant to be taken with some humour.
afterburner 13y ago
Someone run this through a compressor, or advise him to stop with the sudden shouts... hurts to listen to...
acqq 13y ago
Steve Jobs would just say: "real artists ship" http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Real_Artists_Ship.txt http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Real_Artists_Ship...
syntaxfree 13y ago
I love Ted Nelson. He had a vision of a future that never materialized, and never will, but he's not bitter. Instead, he's keen on showing people that this "future" thing isn't an inevitable train crashing towards us, but the result of many, many choices, none of them neutral.
mankypro 13y ago
Some dude once said "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it", and he was right.

127 points by mgunes 13y ago

I wonder if meant 'PARC User Interface aka POOEY' ?

rst 13y ago

Interesting thoughts; it would be nice to have a transcript. (It's somewhat ironic in the light of the content that while he's clearly reading a prepared text, it's presented in a way that makes excerpting or reorganization nearly impossible; worse even than files of plain text.)

joe_the_user 13y ago
Good call! Naturally, the prophet of the absolute, ultimate hypertext system puts out his ideas without even using ordinary text. We can assume that in Nelson's world, the system would transcribe and add to his words without him making the effort. (Edit: Despite the fact that Nelson is periodically looking off screen, there's reason to think he's reading from a prepared text. He quite possibly is reading from bullet points that he is used translating into statements - something I think many experienced public speakers do). Nelson is a fascinating character for his idealism concerning what computer interfaces should do. It's easy to see how that idealism might be serving as screen hiding the inherent barriers to such a system ever existing - especially, as technology allows one to give data more structures and inter-relations, there's actually no guarantee that the tools for dealing with those structures will keep with their complexity.
watershawl 13y ago
Youtube videos are auto-transcribed by Google for closed-captioning purposes. You can view the closed caption transcript by clicking the "Transcript" icon under the video. It's in between the "Add to" and "Statistics" icon unless specifically removed by the uploader. I especially like the last line: 13:52in order to sell printers they threw away the universe 13:58thank you

joe_the_user 13y ago

This is a fascinating discussion. It is especially worth watching to the end. Among other things, it seems like one could apply this argument to claim that the-web-as-interface is strictly better than the PARC-style GUI. It well known, however, that Nelson objects to the web nearly as much as he objects to the "PUI". And this is because web is at best as a leaky simulation of multi-part document rather than a real implementation of Nelson's Xanadu vision (articulated in the 60's). The thing is the Xanadu vision, multi-part documents with living links (distributed version control, permissions and etc) is more or less impractical to implement fully. On the other hand, the point that a single-person word-processor certainly could use a series of piece a-la the pre-computer method he describes. As Nelson mentions, one of the key ways the PUI was able to dominate was by organizing a variety of operations with a single metaphor. I suspect that Nelson is underestimating how important that is for making computers accessible to people.

gum_ina_package 13y ago
This video of his seems to give more of a demonstration of his alternative paradigm: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=En_2T7KH6RA http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=En_2T7KH6RA 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.
dclowd9901 13y ago
I'm a software developer, and I (like many) prefer not to work in VIM. If that's not damning to the idea that people would embrace abstract interfaces -- that is, a computer professional preferring a more familiar metaphor -- then I don't know what is.
smrtinsert 13y ago
We're getting closer to that vision thanks to ideas like Android Intents. I don't know how many times I've been amazed and how smoothly applications share and communicate data among them without being specifically designed to collaborate.

miket 13y ago

Is he sitting on a church pew?

jasonwatkinspdx 13y ago
Looks like the Internet Archive headquarters: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:The_main_hall_at_Internet_Archive_(2013).jpg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:The_main_hall_at_Internet_...
- AlecEifel 13y ago
  Nice find! I was wondering the same thing.
- watershawl 13y ago
  I thought the same thing after seeing their call for t-shirts for pillow covers.
- Redoubts 13y ago
  Well, apparently the Archive HQ is a former Christian Science church.

fidotron 13y ago

Oh dear. This is a Jef Raskin-esque rant of an old man that's realised they aren't going to be nearly as influential in the history books as they once thought. I would hope never to have to do the same, either from delusions in the present or anger at the end! This business of underplaying or demeaning the importance of the use of icons, fonts, or familiar metaphors in favour of some abstract notion of an interface that no one has succeeded in ever implementing, not least because no one can agree on what it should be, is a running theme. This is often accompanied by banging on about the importance of what are really just clerical operations. PARC, like any office of a large organisation, was invariably subject to revisionist history, office politics and all sorts of other nonsense, but attempting to deny the fact they did produce the direction for our last 30 years (and possibly into the near future) is ludicrous, much as a similar rant against Bell Labs would be misguided. Most specifically he glosses over the fact that the nature of applications in the environments at PARC had far blurrier lines around the edges than say iOS apps do. They had things like OLE, which the web is clearly trending to recreate in the form of web components because though implementations have sucked the idea itself makes sense to people. Paying close attention to the ideas from PARC you can see that the real philosophical difference is Nelson is closer to the idea of an all ruling single document format - whereas the vision PARC believed in was an all ruling single code format. Once more the parallel to the evolution of the web is clear, in that what began as a way to distribute documents is morphing, slowly, into a method for distributing rich code objects.

AlecEifel 13y ago
Agree 100% -- I couldn't have said it better! In my professional life, I have often met consultant types with super vague technical ideas that (surprise!) they were secretly working on implementing. They woudn't release anything because they fear being criticized. The GUI was a big deal and still is to this day. Xerox PARC did change the world. Ted Nelson? Not so much...
- melloclello 13y ago
  It's not about who did and who didn't change the world, but the fact that the people who did change the world are not above (some pretty ruthless) criticism.

AlecEifel 13y ago

Old man, bitter that Alan Key, Steve Jobs & Xerox PARC got more money & credit than he ever did. Who the hell cares about his gripes? The "legendary story" was generally corroborated by all parties involved. Ted Nelson has yet to admit missing the boat by never being able to release anything in over 40 years. He is a super-consultant & inverse opposite of what Y&C stands for. A great visionary with zero implementation skill. Time to die.

__pThrow 13y ago
That's really ugly. I can understand why you felt the need to create a new throwaway to hide behind.
melloclello 13y ago
If you'd like to read more inflammatory screeds from idealists who've never released anything, I highly recommend the blog of Stanislav Datsovskiy[1], in which he passionately elucidates the finer details of what might constitute a non-horrible operating system/programming environment[2]. > "I sometimes find myself wondering if the invention of the high-level compiler was a fundamental and grave (if perhaps inevitable) mistake, not unlike, say, leaded gasoline."[3] As I gather, he's spent about the last five years or so trying to build a LISP machine from scratch on an FPGA. (PS I see from your profile that you're an iOS dev too... I would think that anybody who writes Objective-C for a living would typically sustain an intense and burning hatred for the state of contemporary programming, and be otherwise eternally fascinated by any proposed alternatives. How do you do it?) [1] http://www.loper-os.org/?p=8 http://www.loper-os.org/?p=8 [2] http://www.loper-os.org/?p=284 http://www.loper-os.org/?p=284 [3] http://www.loper-os.org/?p=55 http://www.loper-os.org/?p=55
pekk 13y ago
Telling an old man it's "time to die" because you idolize PARC or Jobs or something is completely, unacceptably rude.
- Gigablah 13y ago
  Sociopathic, even.

rch 13y ago

I enjoy Ted Nelson when he's sharing historical context, but I hope he realizes that most of the salient points he is making are perfectly obvious to rather a lot of technical people. Affecting meaningful change or progress will take more than impassioned pontification.

deleted 13y ago

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deleted 13y ago

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michaelwww 13y ago

As user jasonwatkinspdx pointed out, he's doing this at the Internet Archive headquarters. He's probably for purpose of recording an oral history. It appears that rather than taking the route of singing the glories of great men past, he figures there's enough of that, so he's giving an alternate view that he calls "computers for cynics" to record some of the less glorious aspects of personal computer history. I think he's made the right choice, although if you weren't aware of the context he would seem to be a bit of a crank. Edit: If you watch "Computers for Cynics 4 - The Dance of Apple and Microsoft [1] he's much less cranky and sings praises to Steve Jobs in a way that made me re-evaluate my opinion of Jobs. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_xL19f48m9U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_xL19f48m9U

1amzave 13y ago
Hmm -- I watched "Computers for Cynics 1 - The Nightmare of Files and Directories" (which I won't bother linking to, because frankly I can't recommend watching it), since file and storage systems are a topic of some interest to me. It was similarly cranky, and littered with statements that were either poor descriptions of the concepts they aimed to explain, highly misleading, or just flat-out incorrect (if he has any idea how filesystems actually work, he's doing a damn good job hiding it).

endlessvoid94 13y ago

It's very difficult to get past his tone in this video -- he seems angry and disgruntled. I'm not saying he doesn't have valid criticisms, but he's not making it very easy to sympathize with him.

nickbauman 13y ago

Is it just me or is Ted's vision basically OpenDoc? http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDoc http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDoc

DougMerritt 13y ago
Not even a little bit close -- nor can you pick up what his vision has been from that video.

leoc 13y ago

It's Ted Nelson rattling through some of his computer-history notes on camera. So it's good material, but it's much better presented in his enjoyable and reasonably-priced book /Geeks Bearing Gifts/ http://www.lulu.com/shop/ted-nelson/geeks-bearing-gifts/paperback/product-4312837.html http://www.lulu.com/shop/ted-nelson/geeks-bearing-gifts/pape... . I noted a couple of apparent mistakes: at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c6SUOeAqOjU#t=4m26s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c6SUOeAqOjU#t=4m26s Nelson says that Xerox paid Jobs to look at the PARC work, while AFAIK Apple in fact paid Xerox, in pre-IPO Apple stock. He also suggested that Xerox tried to bring in Jobs, when it seems to have been Apple who made the approach (at the instigation of Jef Raskin at Apple). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c6SUOeAqOjU#t=2m15s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c6SUOeAqOjU#t=2m15s is misleading. PARC was more-or-less forbidden to buy a DEC PDP-10, which would have reflected badly on the competing machines from Xerox's new acquisition Scientific Data Systems, so PARC built a PDP-10 clone (the MAXC) in-house for their own use. That had very little to do with why they later designed and built the Altos: there was nothing remotely similar to an Alto out there that they could have bought (Nelson knows this).

eliwjones 13y ago

His point about the bastardization of "cut and paste" is very important in my opinion. Hell, he ends with this.. Bringing a complex tangle of code to heel becomes tractable if you just print it out, cut it up, and rearrange the parts. It would be fairly sexy to be able to do this on your computer... granted, you need a lot of screen space to pull it off. Oh, and I'm ignorant of Ted Nelson.... But it seems fairly obvious these talks are meant to be taken with some humour.

afterburner 13y ago

Someone run this through a compressor, or advise him to stop with the sudden shouts... hurts to listen to...

acqq 13y ago

Steve Jobs would just say: "real artists ship" http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Real_Artists_Ship.txt http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Real_Artists_Ship...

syntaxfree 13y ago

I love Ted Nelson. He had a vision of a future that never materialized, and never will, but he's not bitter. Instead, he's keen on showing people that this "future" thing isn't an inevitable train crashing towards us, but the result of many, many choices, none of them neutral.

mankypro 13y ago

Some dude once said "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it", and he was right.