Ted Nelson

1995.06.01 - Wired - The Curse of Xanadu
- "Nelson’s life is so full of unfinished projects that it might fairly be said to be built from them"
- Xanadu, a global hypertext publishing system, is the longest-running vaporware story in the history of the computer industry. It has been in development for more than 30 years.
- Xanadu, the ultimate hypertext information system, began as Ted Nelson’s quest for personal liberation. The inventor’s hummingbird mind and his inability to keep track of anything left him relatively helpless. He wanted to be a writer and a filmmaker, but he needed a way to avoid getting lost in the frantic multiplication of associations his brain produced. His great inspiration was to imagine a computer program that could keep track of all the divergent paths of his thinking and writing. To this concept of branching, nonlinear writing, Nelson gave the name hypertext.
  - I had this same issue, and I found that Confluence really, really helped.
- Nelson has never catalogued his thousands of hours of audio- and videotape.
- Xanadu’s goals – a universal library, a global information index, and a computerized royalty system – were shared by many of the smartest programmers of the first hacker generation.
- Nelson’s heroes were famous non-conformists and businessmen, including Buckminster Fuller, Bertrand Russell, Walt Disney, H. L. Mencken, and Orson Welles.
- Nelson’s hatred of conventional structure made him difficult to educate.
- he came up with the four maxims that have guided his life: most people are fools, most authority is malignant, God does not exist, and everything is wrong. Nelson loves these maxims and repeats them often.
- Nelson had no interest in the smooth, progressive narratives encased in books. He wanted everything to be preserved in all its chaotic flux, so that it could be reconstructed as needed.
- Not only was the constant churn and dispersal of his own thoughts personally devastating, but the general human failure to remember was, Nelson thought, suicidal on a global scale, for it condemned humanity to an irrational repetition of its mistakes.
- Nelson earned a BA in philosophy from Swarthmore, and in 1960 became a graduate student at Harvard.
- Hypertext was invented during his first year at Harvard, when Nelson attempted, as a term project, to create a “writing system” that allowed users to store their work, change it, and print it out. In contrast to the first experimental word processors, Nelson’s design included features for comparing alternate versions of text side by side, backtracking through sequential versions, and revision by outline. Establishing a habit that would persist, Nelson failed to finish the coding, and had to take an incomplete for the course.
- Adding to his design for a nonsequential writing tool, Nelson proposed a feature called “zippered lists,” in which elements in one text would be linked to related or identical elements in other texts. Nelson’s two interests, screen editing and nonsequential writing, were merging. With zippered lists, links could be made between large sections, small sections, whole pages, or single paragraphs. The writer and reader could manufacture a unique document by following a set of links between discrete documents that were “zipped” together.
- In July 1945, long before Nelson turned his attention to electronic information systems, Vannevar Bush published an essay titled “As We May Think” in The Atlantic Monthly, which described a hypothetical system of information storage and retrieval called “memex.” Memex would allow readers to create personal indexes to documents, and to link passages from different documents together with special markers. While Bush’s description was purely speculative, he gave a brilliant and influential preview of some of the features Nelson would attempt to realize in Xanadu.
- He moved quickly into the most complex theoretical territory, asking questions that still challenge hypertext designers today. For instance, if you change a document, what happens to all the links that go in and out? Can you edit a document but preserve its links? What happens when you follow a link to a paragraph that has been erased?
- 2016.10.16 - I stopped as I arrived at Chapter 4.
1997.10.02 - XML.com - Embedded Markup Considered Harmful
1999.01.29 - Xanadu.com.au - Ted Nelson's Computer Paradigm, Expressed as One-Liners