Ted Nelson’s published papers on computers and interaction, 1965 to 1977
Ted Nelson has some novel ideas. But I can&#x27;t help to think that the failure of the mass adoption of his ideas stems from him being too greedy. If he had open sourced the code he wrote for Xanadu, if he had even published specs of a simple Xanadu system free of copyright he could&#x27;ve brought us a better hypertext.<p>The idea that data should consist of small addressable chunks, with each chunk having relations with other data actually makes a lot of sense.<p>We are thinking of data linearly, you start from byte 1 to end. Even if you copy the file or make minor changes the OS considers it another file. You make a reference to a movie, a novel etc., if you do not explicitly add the reference no one knows. Then we end up in piles and piles of data we cannot process. We have to rely on proprietary search engines, we have to rely on our browser history and our memory.<p>And with the latest shiniest web apps that fully render in JS we can&#x27;t even get addressable future-proof links. Try to access a news page from 10 years ago, most likely the link won&#x27;t work. Archive.org helps in that regard. But things could&#x27;ve been easier.<p>We have all these resources at hand, we could implement the idea of transclusion even if it is only limited to our domain. Information-heavy sites such as Wikipedia, C2-wiki etc. would greatly benefit from it.<p>It&#x27;s true that we need a new way to look at data. It is not pen and paper anymore, we need to be able to go beyond searching. Even now, most of the world uses plain-old PDF, which is an image of a printable paper. We can use animations, videos, sound, interactivity in our content, but mostly we don&#x27;t.<p>Ted Nelson thinks this is caused by the invention of the GUI (or PUI -Parc user interface- as he calls it) in Xerox Parc. They needed to show their managers something they could make sense of. So they created the desktop. Here is your trash-bin, here is your notepad, here are your documents (e.g Postscript&#x2F;PDF). It is <i>just</i> like your physical desk.<p>But it is not your physical desk, what you have in front of you is a <i>computer</i>. We teach hours and hours of hand-writing to hour children, but only very few countries teach touch-typing. The old generation either doesn&#x27;t understand or doesn&#x27;t want kids to utilize their full potential with computers. Fortunately kids learn on their own, build their own online communities, so there is hope. Any kid that can get his&#x2F;her hands on Computer Lib&#x2F;Dream Machines won&#x27;t be able to believe the idea that computers are only good for showing us an enhanced simulation of a work-desk.