I've been reading bad sci-fi (I love it). E C Tubb's 'World of Promise' was written in 1980 (published 1985) which seems quite recent, but something that caught my eye (apart from the appalling representation of women. I mean, really bad) is the complete lack of networked computers. There are central data stores which act like giant libraries, and there is a network of cybernetically enhanced humans who dial up to the central psychic computer in hyperspace once a day, but it's still basically a mainframe/thin-client model. Anyway, this grabbed me:
"This of a room," she urged. "One filled with a billion books. Books which hold the answer to every question you care to ask. If you wanted to build something, a raft, for example, they could tell you how. But you'd have to dig. One book might teach you how to temper steel, another how to cut a thread, a third how to weld. More would teach you how to mine for minerals, smelt metals, process the raw supplies. Then you'd need to discover the correct alloy for the antigrav units and how to make the generator and all the rest of it." A lifetime of work and that was knowing what you wanted to begin with. But, once done, others could follow.
It's the last sentence that reminds me of the concept of trails in the memex in Vannevar Bush's As We May Think. Trails are what I was talking about when I mentioned crib-notes. The kind of content that Jorn Barger provides on the Robot Wisdom pages is so much more valuable than a lot of the stuff around on the web. If it was easier to create trails, if there was a defined way of doing it... And the explosion of new sites because of blogger.com and editthispage.com... If all these people were contributing useful trail-content based on their personal expertise... [sudden flash] I need a good domain name.
I've been reading bad sci-fi (I love it). E C Tubb's 'World of Promise' was written in 1980 (published 1985) which seems quite recent, but something that caught my eye (apart from the appalling representation of women. I mean, really bad) is the complete lack of networked computers. There are central data stores which act like giant libraries, and there is a network of cybernetically enhanced humans who dial up to the central psychic computer in hyperspace once a day, but it's still basically a mainframe/thin-client model. Anyway, this grabbed me:
"This of a room," she urged. "One filled with a billion books. Books which hold the answer to every question you care to ask. If you wanted to build something, a raft, for example, they could tell you how. But you'd have to dig. One book might teach you how to temper steel, another how to cut a thread, a third how to weld. More would teach you how to mine for minerals, smelt metals, process the raw supplies. Then you'd need to discover the correct alloy for the antigrav units and how to make the generator and all the rest of it." A lifetime of work and that was knowing what you wanted to begin with. But, once done, others could follow.
It's the last sentence that reminds me of the concept of trails in the memex in Vannevar Bush's As We May Think. Trails are what I was talking about when I mentioned crib-notes. The kind of content that Jorn Barger provides on the Robot Wisdom pages is so much more valuable than a lot of the stuff around on the web. If it was easier to create trails, if there was a defined way of doing it... And the explosion of new sites because of blogger.com and editthispage.com... If all these people were contributing useful trail-content based on their personal expertise... [sudden flash] I need a good domain name.