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

When I write code it is usually either "kiddicode" for future "kiddilanguages" or "metacode" (for future languages ".") I did have a lot of fun last year writing code in a resurrected version of the Notetaker Smalltalk-78 (done mostly by Dan Ingalls and Bert Freudenberg from a rescued disk pack that Xerox had thrown away) to create a visual presentation for a tribute to Ted Nelson on his 70th birthday: this video This particular system was a wonderful sweet spot for those days -- it was hugely expressive and quite small and understandable (my size). (This was the Smalltalk system that Steve Jobs saw the next year in 1979 -- though with fewer pictures because of memory limitations back then).

An easy way to try ST-72 is in your browser here: link and ST-78 here: link The above links run emulators in Javascript and have been used for live demos as well (see this video for a fun one) Related, for a Javascript based live system check out link (also created by Dan Ingalls).

“The real goal is to design the form and nature of the software ‘entities’ — the ‘programmable substrate’ that we manipulate and compose when we program and use the system” Reminded me of bret victors “toolkits, not apps” comment ( link ) and an excerpt from the smalltalk era : this video

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,

Yes, this siloing stops me from using annotation features "native" to each app and format as such as well. Instead, I prefer to exfiltrate information from the silos(apps, formats, etc) and put them into my note taking system. Then I can do highlights, annotations, etc. on my own terms and also get the benefits of centralization such as searching and linking(the OP has another post describing their own system, which is pretty cool[1]). Currently I'm using Notion, which is also a silo of its own, but it's one that gives me a lot of control over how I lay my information out(and an escape plan from). There are a lot of perspectives on this issue with data silos and walled gardens. But I'm of the opinion that it's a fairly bad state for all of us "end users". Computers to me are about infinite flexibility and malleability, but ironically the tools we have for annotation and remixing are in practice worse than what we have in the physical world. Reading a book in the physical world, I can converse with the author simply by jotting marginalia with my pencil. It's fluid, intuitive, and the medium of paper encourages it(in fact it can't help but be mutated by my use!: pages get bended, stained, torn, etc.). If I want to go further I can add post-it notes to mark interesting passages, I can xerox some pages and create subsections, if it's a magazine I can just tear them all out! That kind of flexibility just isn't available on a computer. I think it's worth thinking really hard why we

Can I do similar magic as shown in the demo [0] today? I mean .. is there a system/tool/platform which allows that kind of interaction? I know about Smalltalk instances like Squeak[1], Etoys[2], Pharo[3] .. Are these capable of what is shown in the demo? [0] this video [1] link [2] link [3] link

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

"In Imagine a world without apps Shira Ovide asks “a wild question: What if we played games, shopped, watched Netflix and read news on our smartphones — without using apps? Our smartphones, like our computers, would instead mostly be gateways to go online through a web browser.” This question can be extrapolated into a larger question: “What do we want from our technology?"" To quote Bret Victor, "Toolkits, not Apps" : link this video Jumping straight into talk about providers, personal data, security, etc. assumes cultural scaffolds of 'personal' around the device. That's fine, but the assumption needs to be made aware.

Alan Kay made scathing comments on the World Wide Web browser (reinventing a broken wheel) at length in a lecture "Normal Considered Harmful" for computer science students at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. For context: Alan himself invented WYSIWYG at Xerox PARC. He was present at "the mother of all demo's" by Douglas Englebart. Ted Nelson who invented hyperlinks and Xanadu got Alan in touch with his future wife [2] and Alan was there at Apple when Bill Atkinson made Hypercard. He mentions that when he told Tim Berners Lee about the much better work of Douglas Englebart, Tim was chagrined (that he had not read any of the papers about earlier and much better designs of 28, 25 and 20 years before the WWW browser). Of course Alan also discusses how the web should have been done. In short, it should be that when you click a hyperlink you load a virtual machine in a secure sandbox of a Operating System Kernel. The virtual machine would then render the (bitmap or vector) pages. Operating System 101, well known in 1965. Of course, Alan's team did implement this (several times). I can demo this if you contact me. Email me at morphle [at] ziggo [dot] nl for a video where Alan Kay, Douglas Englebart and Tim Berners Lee meet and talk about this at a forum discussion. You can ask me about anything related to Alan, Ted or Douglas, I maintain an extensive archive with all scientific papers, emails, talks, interviews and lecture video's. Alan, Ted and Douglas worked closely togeth