Computers for Cynics 2 - It All Went Wrong at Xerox PARC

TheTedNelson
5 HN recommenders · recommended in 3 months, 2014–2023
YouTube
23K views · 14 years ago · talk · intermediate · historical

Ted Nelson's 2012 talk from his Computers for Cynics series gives his view of Xerox PARC. He argues that its graphical interface left out much of what computing could have been, from the standpoint of his hypertext ideas.

HN people value it as a counterweight to PARC's own story, because Nelson lists what its vision left out, though a commenter notes a few factual slips.

“Nelson does a great job enumerating the limitations of PARC's vision and the capabilities absent from PARC's work.”
GUI historyHCI pioneers & visionary demos
#tednelson#xeroxparc#hypertext#computinghistory#guicritique

7 comments from Hacker News

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@bbotond2016 · in “Computers for Cynics 2 – It All Went Wrong at Xerox PARC”
Submitted the video to Hacker News.
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@curtis2016 · in “Computers for Cynics 2 – It All Went Wrong at Xerox PARC (Ted Nelson, 2012)”
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@based22016 · in “Computers for Cynics 2 – It All Went Wrong at Xerox PARC”
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@tod2222014 · in “Alan Kay at Demo: The Future Doesn't Have to Be Incremental”
Thank you. Nelson does a great job enumerating the limitations of PARC's vision and the capabilities absent from PARC's work. After being exposed to PARC's self-congratulatory self-promotion for decades, Nelson's history is a breath of fresh air. This is not to devalue what PARC accomplished, but that its accomplishments must be taken in perspective. It All Went Wrong at Xerox PARC is also on YouTube: ▶ this video
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@mgunes2014 · in “Ted Nelson: It All Went Wrong at Xerox PARC”
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@seltzered_2023 · in “Doug Engelbart’s 1968 demo”
This comment jogged my memory of a Ted Nelson video subtitled 'It all went wrong at Xerox PARC' : ▶ this video
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@leoc2014 · in “Ted Nelson: It All Went Wrong at Xerox PARC”
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/ link . I noted a couple of apparent mistakes: at ▶ this video 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). ▶ this video 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).
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