Pioneers: Ted Nelson

Interview transcript: www.notion.so/...
For more episodes of the Pioneers series including photos and transcripts, please visit: www.notion.so/...
Ted Nelson is the founding designer of Xanadu, the world's first hypertext project. Xanadu's influence on the Internet as we know it today is unmistakable. Ted coined the word "hypertext" to describe non-sequential writing - but clickable links are only the start of his expansive vision for digital technology. His ideas have influenced projects ranging from Objective-C to the original WWW to entire political philosophies about the role computing tools should play in our lives.
Notion: / notionhq
Devon: / devonzuegel

[@DannyHope]

"It’s been very lonely, but I’ve been absolutely sure of what I’ve been doing all the time" - that made me well up.

[@danielgamito]

Ted's story about Doug Engelbart is one of the saddest stories in the early days of computing. You can hear the melancholy of it well up in Ted every time he talks about it. Imagine what the world would look like today if Doug's funding and people hadn't been usurped by Xerox PARC.

[@federicosalvetti4286]

I can't believe how intelligent this man is and how brilliant and clear of mind at the age of 85 at this point

[@Gszada]

that is what happens when you use your brain everyday 🏋️

[@87gob54]

That was an excellent video of the reality of the last 60 years. The quality of the Teds in the 1960's was everywhere to be seen because we all felt positive about human potential. We also felt the atomic bombs and the Vietnam war. I think Teds story shows how the bellicose stupid selfish ways of mankind stuffed up the wonderful potentials. The world of 2020 and 2021 with hypertext protocols, quantitive easing, and customer service BS communication, is a far cry from the beginnings of Teds visions.

[@mohanvadivel3932]

Thanks Ted 🙏🏻

[@galletitadejengibre1526]

This guay is completly awesome!!! :)

[@OgaksRandomRants]

right acknowledgement for this guys.

[@andybaldman]

36:45 Wow, amazing shoutout to How To Win Friends and Influence People. If someone had given him this book 50 years ago, the internet might be a different place. Amazing.

[@skreutzer]

23:07 There's no such thing as "ownership of ideas", except if you keep them for yourself. Transcopyright, if I'm not mistaken, expects everything to be in the Xanadu system, but there will easily be other systems as well in todays computer landscape, and what digital technology is and does by its nature. Copies need to be send to people in order for them to be able to view them, and from there, they can be copied pretty much without restriction, and be it by copying the copy onto another system that doesn't impose these restrictions, no matter what the law says about it. Now, there are reasons why people might not do that and comply with a copyright regime, but it can't be absolute nor always enforcable, therefore it's optional/voluntary. 24:02 Doesn't matter, Creative Commons has provisions for redistribution, which may very well occur regardless if it is in a lump or in a transcluded span, and a Xanadu implementation would have a hard time to make itself the only and exclusive way to handle digital data on cheap electronics, and implement a legal and/or technically prevention system. Furthermore, the legislator decided that the author as well as the user have certain rights without much of a clue what the law should say and how things actually work, so it doesn't matter much how it is implemented, confused print-era copyright works for and against the notion of Transcopyright anyway. 24:40 How useful is a system for literature that answers with 402 most of the time instead of 404? How can you be sure that you're not buying junk you don't want? Sure, it's micropayments, not very expensive, but surely people will try to game the system with fake EDLs, clickbait and spam that doesn't serve any other purpose than trying to make you download a lot of spans/portions you otherwise wouldn't even consider buying. 25:20 What if the server goes down? 26:03 Did the advice change, to not look into that one? 29:56 And I keep listening, listening and listening, the problem is: there seems to be nobody implementing it. 30:52 I think there's plenty of evidence that micropayments continue to not be strictly necessary, for decades now already. 32:41 Well, for addressing things on remote machines, these machines have file systems, and why not allow access via URLs directly to the file system the way the data is offered is structured in directories, the server application passing the URL right through to the local file system? Then, if directory or file names contain spaces or other special characters, these may break certain operating system paths, therefore special characters need to be escaped, and you surely do it in hex with the percent in front of it to signal escaping. As far as HTTP and ReST is concerned, the URLs are mere IDs with no real resemblence of any file system access paths. 32:02 Oh my, no. It's a little bit more difficult. It helped the web a lot in terms of growth to allow 404, because avoiding the problem and pretending that it's not there and having requests fail allowed for much faster speed and much less trouble. 34:19 I wonder too. Have a few suggestions, why it remains relatively unusable right now, but whatever. 34:31 Who cares about programming effort, that's what developers are there for, as long as time isn't wasted for stupid reasons, that aren't strategically smart to bootstrap a system for literature. 35:29 Have you looked into Flattr, for reasons of why and how it worked, and stopped to work? 37:22 No, the flame will be kept burning, it's just that it can't be under the name of Xanadu for trademark reasons and that it can't be compatible with your implementations because they're secret and proprietary, so alternatives need to be created from scratch. 37:53 That's impossible. It's cheap and simple electronics everywhere, in places over which no state or author has effective control over. It's like claiming that copyright would need to be a fundamental part of the Gutenberg press or hand-copying manuscripts. 38:15 These attempts to do it as a business is what killed most of the early hypertext pioneer efforts in my mind. Sure, it absolutely made sense at the time: if there's the number crunching business, there will be a similar business around text, but with online shopping, computer games and video sites, unfortunately, little money remains in text, and the early pioneers largely failed to recognize and adapt, at the expense of the digital library and digital scholarship. 38:35 Today, everybody is part of the publishing world, just not necessarily of the traditional one. 40:47 And the harm they've done to the computing world and the digital future we now can't have because of them.

[@andybaldman]

I don't think he's going to read or answer any of this.

[@skreutzer]

​@@andybaldman How could he, because the channel is operated by Notion, so he doesn't get notified (not quite a hypertext/hypermedia platform/system obviously). Other than that, Ted is using KZbin for broadcast (at least regarding his own channel), but this doesn't mean that viewers couldn't engage in discussing his content. For his particular position/approach towards copyright and trademark, I guess it has done him some good and some bad, and I have to deal with that somehow, that's all.

[@connorcreegan]

ezra pound once said something like "nothing written for money is worth the paper it is printed on." i shudder to think of what he would have said about paywalled electronic documents and software patents.

[@DannyHope]

When’s @Notion going to get in-app transclusion? I get that embeds are an example of transclusion, but I’d like to be able to include sections of Notion pages too.

[@DannyHope]

;)

[@hazyipa]

Very interesting guy, thanks for doing these interviews. I have to say though, I can kind of see why he's not more well known, why he may not have had as much success, he seems a bit frustrating on an interpersonal level.

[@klgamit]

I love Ted's ideas. A technicality about transclusions is that it may actually be useful to make a copy of a transclusion for scalabality, to avoid overloading the original server with requests. So actually you can include the copy and compute a hash on it, and send only the hash to the original server so it will verify your transclusion is legal. The verifying party can also be a highly available cluster of servers that only contain document text coordinates to hash pairs. This may become more important for transclusion of bigger data types like video fragments (essentially a reliable and verifyable caching mechanism for transclusions)

[@russellhaley6901]

I think that is why people are starting to involve blockchain in the idea.

[@eduardofcgo]

HTTP already does this, whether its a transclusion or not does not matter, any resource can be cached. The specific problem you mention is solved using "If-None-Match" and its just an implementation detail of the transport protocol, not really relevant to the ideas being talked about here

[@andybaldman]

The whole micropayment thing seems like it requires people to be honest in order to work. What prevents someone from just copying the source text into their document, instead of transcluding/linking it? Then they wouldn't have to pay.

[@Danny-qh4su]

This is why his idea doesn’t work in practicality. Files on computer are too easily reproduced. I’m surprised he didn’t mention Bitcoin. The blockchain is a newer version of his idea

[@ZedGames]

@@Danny-qh4su He has several videos on bitcoin on his youtube channel

[@Danny-qh4su]

@@ZedGames Yeah, is he interested in IPFS? Could build Xanadu on top of it

[@4Exp4]

Amazing and unapologetic guy.

[@mr.nurav_nifty]

Serial experiments Lain

[@davidmella1174]

I wonder if he knows

[@russellhaley6901]

"Creative Commons is a way for people to give up being paid." Lolz.

[@TonyStark-po7zg]

That chick is hot.