Here’s some enlightening info about XanaduSpace. If you have no idea what’s going on, read it.
Ted Nelson gave a talk at school today.
He handed out some copies of ZigZag and Xanadu and demoed XanaduSpace. Having heard about it for ages and seeing demonstrations in other videos scattered across the web, it was great to see it right there. I think a combination of seeing it materialise despite the rather long-lived smear campaign against it (the print equivalent of Googlebombing “Xanadu” for “vaporware”) and hearing Ted talk about concrete implementation details (C++, OpenGl and Python back-end, next platform will be iPhone, Flash version soon) really brought it to life.
The basic thread of the talk was an indignant reminder that technology was really just “packaging and conventions” and that we had learned to use kludgy solutions rather than engineering great solutions (this was blamed on techies). Nelson believes that the web’s infrastructure (one-way links, unsourced quotations etc.) is a shadow of what it should be, and that 1984, when Xerox PARC gave us the desktop metaphor, was when “it all went wrong”. Seems fair.
At age 70, having been ridiculously ahead of the curve for so long but never really achieving the recognition he deserves, Nelson continues to pursue his original projects with zeal and keen perceptiveness. Listening to his anecdotes and analogies reminded me strongly of interviews with Richard Feynman.
Mr Smith covered the talk.
Update: since writing this post, I have read Geeks Bearing Gifts, which I thoroughly recommend to anyone with any interest in computers. Nelson’s autobiography, Possiplex, is imminent: find it and read it. Coincidentally, I visited Greenwich Village in NY (where Nelson grew up) – nice place!
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