2003-08-27 Ted Nelson- The Betrayed Promise of Personal Computing- 09.00 [fantastic, the slides are hand written. red marker pen for headlines] media person, directing films, written a book, did magazines and newspaper first brochure he saw (2nd year of graduate school): pdp-3, $35000, no display or tty was clear this was the media of the future. wanted to keep a track of all the information he encountered, to make connections, to know things, stop things slipping away. the big problem was categorisation... cross-indexing, cross-filing. you also need to know where *else* something's being used when you use it. how do you do that with paper? the computer is exactly for keeping track of things: you can "see things in many places". (he found a quote in 1974 that said the same thing, about ship design.) the future would have to be personal computers that let people reuse content seamlessly without asking permission. requotability. but copyright laws weren't going to go away. so you let people pay for the parts. (write once, point to it thereafter. referential text.) and it all comes together in "what we now call the browser". all of this in place as a concept by christmas 1960. "early adopters never switch", and he's still convinced with his first notion. broken promises of personal computing: * easy record-keeping * nothing lost * simplify life * easy programming broken promises of hypertext: * permanent availability * deep connnections * profuse link overlays * frictionless reuse (with copyright management, transquotation) [lovely scrawled slides] -> Two popes, One paradigm * hierarchy simulation (this is hard to achieve, the hardware's not hierarchic) * paper simulation Geek metaphysics: "Structure means hierarchy" on xml: "trying to fix html is like trying to graft arms and legs onto a hamburger. and that's exactly what they've done" there are more kinds of structure than the hierarchy, we should be representing things directly and exactly, not shoehorning it in {If you're intersted, there's a paper in the AH workshop proceedings called "mSpace" which is about multidimensional domain representation - paralle and orthogonal reps of the space for ease of access. - just for ref.mc actually, one of the probs we've found is how to make orthogonal slices through dimensions available/knowable to a user, so they can "jump" parts of the graph that no longer seem to connect if you slice the space differently. -also, representing the slices "as" hierarchies we've found is a lot more tractable for users than 3d visualizaitons. which 25% of the population can't handle. so temporary hierarchies are great for understanding contxt of a particular parallel} * PARALLELISM example: 50 simultaneous phonecalls on a single topic should be a single document. the parallel nature of the document is key to it [pragmatics vs semantics] other examples: there are three definitive Hamlets; some of the gospels back onto Q ditto footnotes, these are overlays... why should they be at the back/bottom? these are all parallelisms. "you can represent hierarchies better in parallel structures than parallelism in hierarchy" * POLYPRESENCE a fish in a number of parallel contexts: marine biology; cooking; religion => transclusion [many manifestations] the same thing knowably in two places/ contexts [I disagree with this... context is part of the thing, surely] {indeed - maintaining context is very important for a) implicit learning about a domain where that thing is listed b) aging users. they do much better with spatial context when exploring than without. } we've tried to emulate this with caching, shortcuts/aliases... transclusion cannot be accomplished in the real world, so the geek metaphysics try to imitate that: keys are in a pocket of a jacket in the cupboard ditto paper, which imprisons the ideas in it. we can build a better universe! only gods are transcluded how documents look to TN: soft shell, reuse of content eg with films: you end up with a whole load of shots, and the film is a selection of that. those shots can be reused in other shows, in other cuts What do hypertext mean? the web lacks: - 2 way links - link overlays that anyone can create the web is just the file system online. directories with one-way jumplinks (although it allows compositing for graphics...) the web is whatever fits in the browser, as created with Mosaic BBC website: - if he loses the url and has to find something it's half an hour! why? because these things are made by geeks and they're the only ones who know how to navigate them. today's formats have an overemphasis on the trivial and fictitious (hierarchy) Xanada design is: - distribute lists of content which are fulfilled by the client - addresses don't change, content doesn't change; we just rearrange it GUI isn't really a GUI: it's the Parc User Interface with the macintosh you were given a very small pipe between applications (the clipboard). what's an app? it's stuff that's cut off from other apps the clipboard is just a word to hide the fact that everything that makes a clipboard isn't there: it destroys the last content and you can't see it. demonstrating cut and paste: printing stuff out, cutting it up and pasting it to a piece of paper. he contents there is no other way to do serious large-scale writing. so people can't write large things now. ("hide and plug") {neal stephenson who wrote the very large cryptonomicon on a laptop may disagree [cory doctorow writes his novels in BBEdit too] bbedit rules! y! hydrahydra ;^} bbedit goes hydra! that would be cool!} demo of cosmicbook: visible links between links in separate document. the link overlays are contained in a separate file. transquotation: using a version of textedit and a server, it's possible to view text renditions of the document, quotations from it, contexts for the quotations. the url is constructed to character count into the document to select a quotation. this can then be reused in another document. TN is going to use this as the format to put anything on the web now { -http://shaka.dgp.toronto.edu/hg/overview that's an example of a system that lets a user grab components from web pages into a user-defined web page. the bits collected in that page have links back to the "original" source if the user wants the original context back. it does this -makes transclusions - by making addreses for components selected on the fly. just if you're interested in an implementation. -mc [can't get this url to work? mw] sorry. corrected [ta!] } back to cut and paste: - scans of cut and pasted documents (or with crossed-out bits and arrows) from documents: 1660, 1862 etc so how do we fix this? . current design is called VLIT88 . mapping character based URN and univeral address space from xanadu 88 . has to work in the browser . transquotation & transcopyright * WHAT TN DOES FOR FUN: III PERSONAL COMPUTING - he's going to fix the PC [:)] ZigZag... discrete cells connected at right angles any whicway. but always top-to-bottom, left-edge-to-right-edge in as many dimensions as you like. [ie, nodes, and ordinal lists of nodes. kind of like pre-excel spreadsheets?] there's a java demo of this... in principle viewable in rows and columns. zigzag is a "virtual interactive machine" {goto: http://xanadu.com/zigzag/ } different cell types with different functions different dimensions for different groupings, references, operators it's a kind of chemistry, with . atoms . molecules . crystals molecules, groups of cells of different types. crystrals are structures of these open gl demo in 3-space. with flythrough zigzag is one space for everything. "one fabric". to reprogram windows with microsoft tools requires c++ knowledge. to put controls in this system, it's cells and you have access to all of that. [this reminds me of alan kay and smalltalk. and in fact what's been build could have a slice that looks like lifestreams.] {you might want to look at a paper called "intersecting multiple hierarchies" or polyarchic visualization by george robertson and mary czerwinski from microsoft research.} [i've heard this same topic come up quite a lot recently... OO is difficult, and things like aspect oriented programming are trying to get around the single hierarchy problem] {but there are always only hierarchies as slices through multidimensional space at one time.} [i agree. people trying to fix OO/hierarchy, and it's not just a "fix" that can be bolted on to our existing systems/metaphors] {for instance, in mspace, we dropped trying to represent multiple dimensions in 3dimensions on a 2.5d space. we're sticking with 2d that gives hierarchical slices - but the advantage is that more of the population can use it. you lose 25 % of the population with 3d add a layer of complexity with no information of value back to the user.} {thanks all} {thanks to you too... fun [jeffs]} [cheers all, laters.] he would play a song at the end, but that would ruin the streamability of the show to play a copyrighted song... [:)] == question on RDF: - zigzag is a graph structure with rows and columns. each order has a dimensional assignment. it's this ordinal thing. [rdf is zigzag with more than one connection to a single side... and that's it. zigzag collapses the symmetry of the pure graph into something more usful] zigzag has no linktypes, onto dimensions with orders ==== Rumblings: - in the intro, the point was made that early text editors were hung up on the *linebreak* ("\n" as the big revolution of our time. how many times did people augment the number system really badly before they came up with zero?), which is all about formatting (nroff etc). but not about the important stuff