Alan Kay's tribute to Ted Nelson at "Intertwingled" Festival

Every time I see something like this, I'm also reminded of this demo of the Xerox Alto from a few years back. I'll link to the start of the most relevant piece: ▶ this video I'm always struck by the useful directions that desktop computers were going in the 70s, and how computing could be so much better than it is right now. But we've veered so off-course from all of this, away from composability and towards independent boxes ("applications") that can't talk to each other at all. Emacs is in some ways the best thing we have today in the other direction, but it pales in comparison to what's possible.

> Thanks for sharing, I love these types of stories. Really makes me pine for the "old" days, and wonder if there's a parallel universe where technology took a very different route such that languages like APL, Lisp, and Smalltalk are used instead of JavaScript, Java, and C#, and what that world looks like. Easy, here is some time travel, "Alan Kay's tribute to Ted Nelson at "Intertwingled" Festival" ▶ this video "Eric Bier Demonstrates Cedar" link "Yesterday's Computer of Tomorrow: The Xerox Alto │Smalltalk-76 Demo" link However to be fair, Java, C# and Swift alongside their IDEs are the closest in mainstream languages to that experience, unless you get to use Allegro, LispWorks or Pharo.

Ted Nelson: Computer Lib / Dream Machines (1975) [pdf] (worrydream.com) link link For what it's worth, YC is helping Ted Nelson sell his "Computer Lib / Dream Machines" book: link This book is a truly unique and is worth owning in hardcopy format. link Ted versus The Media Lab [video] (youtube.com) link link Interview with Ted Nelson (notion.so) link link Ted Nelson on What Modern Programmers Can Learn from the Past [video] (ieee.org) link link Ted Nelson struggles with uncomprehending radio interviewer (1979) [audio] (youtube.com) link link Ted Nelson’s published papers on computers and interaction, 1965 to 1977 (archive.org) link link Ask HN: What is the best resource for understanding Ted Nelson's ZigZag? link link link Alan Kay's tribute to Ted Nelson at "Intertwingled" Fest (how the script of Tron was the first movie script to ever be edited by a word processing program, on the Alto computer) ▶ this video "Silicon Valley Story" — a Very Short Romantic Comedy by Ted Nelson A playful story about the microcircuitry of love, with Ted Nelson as an absentminded genius, featuring Doug Engelbart as Ted's father and Stewart Brand as the villainous CEO. Closing song: "Information Flow", sung by Donna Spitzer and the auteur. With Timothy Leary as the Good Venture Capitalist! link Ted Nelson's Channel link

Having everything in the same space, and being able to inspect and modify anything in real time by the seat of your pants, was exactly how Dan Ingalls impressed Steve Jobs on his fateful visit to Xerox PARC! It's unfortunate the iPad never did (and never will) achieve that level of power and flexibility. link >Q: What was it like to be at Xerox PARC when Steve Jobs visited? >A: Alan Kay, Agitator at Viewpoints Research Institute >[...] The demo itself was fun to watch — basically a tag team of Dan Ingalls and Larry Tesler showing many kinds of things to Steve and the several Apple people he brought with him. One of Steve’s ways to feel in control was to object to things that were actually OK, and he did this a few times — but in each case Dan and Larry were able to make the changes to meet the objections on the fly because Smalltalk was not only the most advanced programming language of its time, it was also live at every level, and no change required more than 1/4 second to take effect. >One objection was that the text scrolling was line by line and Steve said “Can’t this be smooth?”. In a few seconds Dan made the change. Another more interesting objection was to the complementation of the text that was used (as today) to indicate a selection. Steve said “Can’t that be an outline?”. Standing in the back of the room, I held my breath a bit (this seemed hard to fix on the fly). But again, Dan Ingalls instantly saw a very clever way to do this (by selecting the text as usual, then doing this again with the selection displaced by a few pixels — this left a dark outline around the selection and made the interior clear). Again this was done in a few seconds, and voila! >The Smalltalk used in this demo was my personal favorite (-78) that was done for the first portable computer (The Parc Notetaker), but also ran on the more powerful Dorado computer. For a fun “Christmas project” in 2014, several of us (with Dan Ingalls and Bert Freudenburg doing the heavy lifting) got a version of this going (it had been saved from a disk pack that Xerox had thrown away). >I was able to use this rescued version to make all the visuals for a tribute to Ted Nelson without any new capabilities required. The main difference in the tribute is that the revived version had much more RAM to work with, and this allowed more bit-map images to be used. This is on YouTube, and it might be interesting for readers to see what this system could do in 1978–79. Alan Kay's tribute to Ted Nelson at "Intertwingled" Fest ▶ this video

#Softwarish - I'm biased a bit more towards interface development: greg wilson - What We Actually Know About Software Development, and Why We Believe It’s True - link steve wittens - making webgl dance - the title is deceptive, it's in some ways a visual crash course in linear algebra - link glenn vanderburg - software engineering doesn't work - link chris granger - in search of tomorrow - link alan kay - tribute to ted nelson at intertwingled fest - ▶ this video bret victor - this is already mentioned but if I had to pick one it'd be 'the humane representation of thought' - link #Hardwarish: saul griffith - soft, not solid: beyond traditional hardware engineering - link deb chachra - Architectural Biology and Biological Architectures - link #Getting more meta in technology and history: James Burke - Connections

OP here. Definitely some improvements... but (at least in my eyes) incremental. Notebooks are pretty sweet, but in the hands of very few. They're definitely growing in popularity, which is great. But even the "notebook" concept is a very limited "low pass filter" version of the visions of Engelbart, AKay, TN, etc. The video that AKay has been sharing around in the post than @dang linked to[0] is a great example of what's not-even-close to possible on today's systems. [0]▶ this video