‘The Magical Place of Literary Memory™: Xanadu’
Belinda Barnet
Screening the Past, 20 Dec 2014
Then all the charm
Is broken-all that phantom world so fair,
Vanishes and a thousand circlets spread,
And each mis-shape the other
(Coleridge, cited by Ted Nelson, ‘Dream Machines’, p. 142) […]
Flash By Don Nolan For Ted Nelson 1983...
#tattoo #tattooing #donnolan #tednelson #tattartists #tattooflash #1980s
Flash By Don Nolan For Ted Nelson 1983...
#tattoo #tattooing #donnolan #tednelson #tattartists #tattooflash #1980s
Flash By Don Nolan For Ted Nelson 1982...
#tattoo #tattooing #donnolan #tednelson #tattartists #tattooflash #1980s
A black 3.5-inch diskette with a white label. the label advertises it as a "ZigZag™ Boot Floppy" inviting the users to "EXPLORE AND CONSTRUCT in discrete N-space!" It is gently tucked into a US-letter piece of grey paper on which further instructions have been printed before folding it into a triangular pocket. The whole affair is sitting atop a 19 November 1998 issue of Esther Dyson's "Release 1.0" newsletter, with the topic "Open Mind, Open Source"
The instruction sheet unfolded to show text in triangular quadrants. It's rubbish for OCR due to the weird diagonal boundaries, but there are keystroke guides for things like reassigning axes, connecting cells, breaking conditions, making new dimensions, etc. The summary says "ZigZag space consists of multidimensional lists, viewable (currently) in two dimensions at a time, as rows and columns on the screen. What you can do with this is rather surprising. you can build spreadsheets and outlines and schedules, with fine-grained connections not previously convenient. You can build menus for Unix or DOS macros and their options, and lots of things we haven't had time to do yet. We propose this as a new rational space for the internals of computerdom, for new kinds of data, for new PDAs and phones. Plus you can use game controllers for its 2 windows. Enjoy."
Wow, I just dug up my old #ZigZag (https://www.nongnu.org/gzz/gi/gi.html diskette. I was at one of Roger Gregory's house parties in the Presidio, and #TedNelson demonstrated this software on a 486 resting on the floor. He then handed out these diskettes to […]
[Original post on teh.entar.net]
Conoce a Ted Nelson. Acuñó "hipertexto" en 1965 y soñó con #xanadu, una web mucho más avanzada. Un visionario incomprendido que inspiró Internet. Su legado retro te sorprenderá #tednelson #hipertexto #retrocomputingmx #historiadelaweb
retrocomputingmx.com/mgz6
Web page screenshot ‘Thought Vectors - Ted Nelson Art not Technology’ Greg Lloyd’s Traction Software blog, 5 July 2014 The technoid vision, as expressed by various pundits of electronic media, seems to be this: tomorrow's world will be terribly complex, but we won't have to understand it. Fluttering though halestorms of granular information, ignorant like butterflies, we will be guided by smell, or Agents, or leprechauns, to this or that pretty picture, or media object, or factoid. If we have a Question, it will be possible to ask it in English. Little men and bunny rabbits will talk to us from the computer screen, making us feel more comfortable about our delirious ignorance as we flutter through this completely trustworthy technological paradise about which we know less and less. To give up on human understanding is to give up hope, what we call in English "a counsel of despair." I think there is hope for much better and more powerful software designs that will give ordinary people
“The technoid vision, as expressed by various pundits of electronic media, seems to be this: tomorrow's world will be terribly complex, but we won't have to understand it.” — Ted Nelson (1997)
#TedNelson #hypertext
tractionsoftware.com/traction/per...
