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I haven't watched the video yet, but I can provide some insight. I spent time with Ted in late 1992 and early 1993, when I lived in San Francisco, and Ted lived just north of the Golden Gate on a houseboat in Sausalito. This was just months before the web 'went public.' (That fall, I was hired by O'Reilly & Associates to help build Global Network Navigator, the first commercial website; we launched in October 1993.) Ted could be grumpy and arrogant, but he was also incredibly insightful and visionary in his thinking. It seemed to me that he felt strongly the pulse of the future, and was passionate and driven to build the very best version of that future. Like most visionaries, his perfectionism was a result of careful consideration and system design and an inability to settle for less. It's hard to understand now, but he'd put enormous effort into designing a coherent hypertext system that supported not just simple one-way linking (what we've done for 25 years with HTML/HTTP), but bidirectional linking, including an addressing scheme that could 'transclude' (he liked neologisms) content from any other author, while giving full credit, and even royalties. (If you can find it, read his book Computer Lib / Dream Machines.) He'd been seriously thinking about this stuff since the mid-1960s, and there in the early 1990s, had just started getting traction with a team of people who shared his views. (I was one of them, though a very minor character.) We all knew it was hard, and still quite unclear exactly how all this magic was going to work. Xanadu (Ted's name for his system) had been started and stopped and restarted already a few times. But hanging out on his houseboat in Sausalito, talking data structures and user interfaces with Ted and his gang of incredible programmers, chatting with luminaries who strolled in (I remember Doug Engelbart, inventor of the mouse, coming over one sunny afternoon), was an incredibly heady atmosphere. No one except Ted knew if it would actually work, but it sure was fun to try. Yet the web lurked just around the corner. On a whim, that summer of 1993 I attended some networking exposition (Interop?) in the city. While cruising the aisles, I ran into the O'Reilly folks and their big color X terminal running an early Mosaic browser, showing a very early World Wide Web. Although I didn't get the details, I immediately understood what they were showing: this was hypertext that worked. While Ted's system was an amazing promise, the Web was clearly the reality that would, in its own pragmatic, hacky way, be the way forward. (I believe that Tim Berners-Lee, inventor/enabler of the web-as-we-know-it, has cited Nelson as an major influence.) So look at Ted and his work like a musician's musician, unsung and unrecognized beyond the inner circle. Or like Tesla, a great inventor of impossibly amazing projects. I'm glad Ted's still out there, still inventing, even if Xanadu is but a dream. |