MetaFilter posts tagged with hypertext

Mother of All Demos

honest knave — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 19:06:57 -0800

Forty years ago, Douglas Engelbart gave the Mother of All Demos. In this demo, he introduced the mouse (the trackball had been around for 16 years already), the hyperlink (simultaneously invented by Ted Nelson), word processing conventions, expanding hierarchical views of files, image links, group annotations of documents, collaborative editing, separation between views and models, and user testing of productivity software. SRI went on to Xerox PARC, where the Graphical User Interface and laser printing were later developed. Those of you in the Stanford area may wish to attend the 40th anniversary bash from 1-5:30pm on 9 Dec at the Stanford University Memorial Auditorium. Engelbart pioneered research into the use of computers for the augmentation of human capabilities. In the academic world, this research is continued by researchers in Human Computer Interaction and Hypertext. The original computer systems which ran Engelbart's demo are very rare now, which is why the Computer History Museum is working on a preservation project to clone NLS. Speaking of history, Engelbart participated in an oral history a few years back. Modern software which is similar to NLS or descended from it would include Tinderbox, NoteTaker, NoteBook, and MyInfo. Ted Goranson at ATPM has a wonderful series of reviews on NLS-alikes and what makes good ones good. All of this innovation from Doug did not make him a rich man. But he carries on his initial vision toward an Open Hypermedia System under the auspices of the Bootstrap Institute. Others have taken the idea of augmentation in completely different directions. (previously here, and here)

VF: How the Web Was Won

spiderwire — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 21:02:34 -0800

Vanity Fair has a typically excellent article out -- "How the Web Was Won," an oral history of the Web. Even if you're familiar with ARPANet, Metcalfe's Law, Pearl Harbor Day, the VC rush, whatever -- the story told by the often-animated people at the center of the whirlwind is an enlightening and entertaining experience. And for those of you don't know the history of the Internet, learn it! This is part of your heritage now. I just like this quote because it sums up my experience with all hackers-as-CEOs:

Jeff Bezos: When we started out, we were packing on our hands and knees on these cement floors. One of the software engineers that I was packing next to was saying, You know, this is really killing my knees and my back. And I said to this person, I just had a great idea. We should get kneepads. And he looked at me like I was from Mars. And he said, Jeff, we should get packing tables. We got packing tables the next day, and it doubled our productivity.

Hypertexopia - a sort of new type of Wiki for publishing on the net

stbalbach — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 16:05:55 -0800

Hypertextopia is a hypertext authoring site with some new twists on interface and design concepts. Example stories include The Seven Voyages of Sinbad, The Butterfly Boy by William Vollmann, and others from The Grand Library.

The Dictionary of the Khazars

dhruva — Sun, 20 Nov 2005 01:53:36 -0800

The Dictionary of the Khazars "For all its delights, for all the structural novelty and the comic inventiveness of the imagery, it must be said there is something rather light and airy about this book. It is fun to chase down all the linkages between entries; but as they are conjoined more by the bubbling repetition of motifs and the requirements of the formal devices than by real narrative event or development, it is, as Mr. Pavic himself suggests, a bit like working a crossword puzzle."

February, 1989.

Tlogmer — Sat, 27 Nov 2004 22:45:57 -0800

February, 1989.
The U.S.S.R. leaves Afghanistan, a fatwa is issued for Salman Rushdie, Tim Berner-Lee is writing a proposal for something called "hypertext", Salvador Dalí is laid to rest, and Terry Gross interviews William Gibson.

Your own personal wiki

iffley — Mon, 27 Sep 2004 08:27:57 -0800

Tiddlywiki looks fantastic, but the idea's so cool I'm still not sure what I'd use it for. So far, there's a only a tiddly hypertext story. Bears watching.

And all our yesterdays have lighted fools

matteo — Fri, 11 Jun 2004 07:27:39 -0800

The Sound and the Fury. 75 years ago, William Faulkner finished his fourth novel. It was published later in the fall (October 7, 1929), and for the first fifteen years sales totaled just over 3,300 copies (an appendix was added in 1946, when most of Faulkner's books were out of print. Of course, a few years after that he was awarded the Nobel Prize). It was Faulkner's own favorite novel, primarily, he said, because he considered it his "most splendid failure". Many critics think it's the finest work of an American Master: the key to Faulkner, wrote Alfred Kazin (.pdf file), lies not only in the unflinching extremity of his God-blasted characters, but in the odd and unaccountable moments of redemptive human tenderness. The Internet is very kind to Faulkner's fans: we can check out the Faulkner home, his manuscripts and even his pipe, trivia from his Postmaster's days, we can read examples of his snarkiness (hurled against Hemingway and Clark Gable), we can admire the pages of screenplays from his Hollywood days. We can go to Faulkner academic conferences, too: in the USA and Japan. Want to know what Bunny Wilson and Ralph Ellison had to say about Faulkner? Here. (more inside, with Conan O'Brien)

liam — Thu, 07 Feb 2002 14:52:05 -0800

The Book of Sand - a hypertext puzzle (via the Garden of Forking Paths). "There are people who barely feel poetry, and they are generally dedicated to teaching it." Jorge Luis Borges.

walrus — Tue, 09 Oct 2001 05:52:10 -0800

The web isn't proper hypertext says Ted Nelson, who probably invented the idea.

"I define hypertext as non-sequential writing ... the World Wide Web is not what we were trying to create. The links only go one way. There's no permanent publishing. There is no way you can write a marginal note that other people can see on what's in front of you. There is no way that you can quote freely. "

So is everyone fully comfortable with the idea of a "two way web", or are we still too hung up on picket fence territorialism? And how would it work, anyway?

pascal — Wed, 11 Jul 2001 11:17:33 -0800

Modern computing born... film at 11.
"On December 9, 1968, Douglas C. Engelbart and the group of 17 researchers working with him in the Augmentation Research Center at Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, CA, presented a 90-minute live public demonstration of the online system, NLS, they had been working on since 1962. The public presentation was a session in the of the Fall Joint Computer Conference held at the Convention Center in San Francisco, and it was attended by about 1,000 computer professionals. This was the public debut of the computer mouse. But the mouse was only one of many innovations demonstrated that day, including hypertext, object addressing and dynamic file linking, as well as shared-screen collaboration involving two persons at different sites communicating over a network with audio and video interface."