Interview with Ted Nelson
Ted Nelson’s writing reminds me of the alternative history science fiction of Philip K. Dick, whose novel, “The Man in the High Castle,” described a United States which lost WWII to Germany and Japan. Ted Nelson maps an alternative history for personal computing. Unlike “The Man in the High Castle,” though, Nelson offers a romantic vision; more along the lines of what if Hitler had never risen to power in Germany? Am I being a little extreme here? Well, yes, a tad: comparing Microsoft to Nazism. Yet things could have been different, so very different…if more people had not only read Ted Nelson, but acted upon what the man was saying.
.. “It’s a Wonderful Life”? That is, I believe, the longest script in history. The amount of dialogue that flows is inconceivable. It’s a long film, but the amount of dialogue is much greater than anyone would dare write today.
What does Nelson think of Marshall McLuhan's read on computers?
He was totally ignorant. We once had lunch. I really liked him as a person, but he didn’t get it at all. What I hadn’t been warned was that you don’t get a second sentence in with McLuhan. So I started to talk about hypertext and he launched into his speech #340: “Well, a computer is completely invariant in its processes and unable to change its behavior in any way.” Which is completely wrong. He just didn’t get it, and the interesting thing is that some people take him as the visionary of hypermedia. In great fact, he was not. He was extrapolating his distinction between radio and television and print into realms he did not even dimly comprehend.
.. The word “reality” is usually political, meaning that what I choose to say is significant and I insist you acknowledge me. There are many aspects of reality and what is right there right now is not necessarily going to be prevailing if we can build a better system. So that is why I do not countenance most of today’s so-called web standards, because they’re crap. We need something much better and it is my duty to try to make a different reality which can supplant that other reality.
.. Tim Berners-Lee fashioned a way of pointing at conventional files and conventional directories via path names, visible to the user, over the Net. To me the notion of files and hierarchical directories is an unfortunate tradition that messes up the very nature of content. .. The book should have a title and be retrievable from anywhere without the so-called URL