[PaulDavisThe1st]

In the late 80s I was working at Rabbit Software in Malvern PA (they made IBM 3270 terminal emulator software). I used to car pool to work from Phila. with a brilliant woman who was a lot older than me, and had a solid lifetime of IBM mainframe experience. I was a Unix hacker with just a few years under my belt.

We realized very quickly that if there was one thing we couldn't talk to each other about, it was computers.

[jancsika]

Back in 1984 George Lewis apparently did a stint at IRCAM, culminating in an electro-acoustic performance with three Apple IIe's connected by MIDI to three DX7s. I'd bet his conversations with the IRCAM directors were similarly limited!

[DonHopkins]

Speaking of IRCAM, does anybody know Joseph "jojo" Francis -- [e-mail]?

Scenes don't sprout like blueberry bushes -- or baobab trees with their roots in the sky. Someone does the legwork -- or the scene quietly dies while everyone assumes it was a natural feature of the landscape.

Maintenance is fragile and underappreciated until it stops; you do it for the love of the game even when reciprocity is uneven; the process of putting the thing on is often where the real community forms, not the event flyer. Someone spent fifteen years building a local scene and still says it was worth it after Facebook ate the users. Someone else noted that recreational typing on HN rarely becomes meeting people. Sometimes it does, if you treat the thread as a place to organize a hunt instead of only consume takes.

Which brings me to a digression that already started elsewhere in this thread (IRCAM, Apple IIes, DX7s) and to the kind of legwork I actually enjoy: preserving a weird primary source, then trying to find the human who wrote it.

Does anyone know how to contact the legendary Jojo -- Joseph Francis, once [e-mail]?

I asked FJ!!!; he thought Jojo was last seen in LA. Brewster -- if you're reading this -- any breadcrumbs? I'm wandering the stacks the way the Archive wanders the Web: save the strange pages, then go looking for the people. That is producing social fabric, just with a longer half-life. If you knew him from Paris / Usenet / soc.motss, please point him here or forward this.

Jojo, if you see this: please email [e-mail]. I'd love to catch up, reminisce, and talk about applying those brilliant (and ridiculous) UI ideas now. I'd rather you tell your own story than have me invent one.

His classic Usenet riff, glorious typos intact:

http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/x-windows/jojo-o...

Jojo built it with words decades ago, and boy did he make me come! He invented a whole product line of design-free GUI kits (POSEUR, XYmorph, Quagmire, boraX -- all open, scalable, and extensible, of course), then drops the mask for one paragraph he titles XBorges:

>One longs for the day when the responsibility of programming computers falls squarely on the shoulders of the users, where it belongs; they are provided with a set of infinitely configurable instruction codes, on an open, extensible, and scalable n-bit bus, and their task before setting upon work, is the naming of all the operations they want, and encoding them into words, sentences, phrases and storing them for instant retrieval while they use ideas communicated to them from all the users before to choose most wisely within the infinities of possibility. They have at their hands all books written, all interfaces, they merely traverse endless treelike chains of possibility, of choice, of alternate (open, scalable, and extensible) universes; baobob-like roots in the sky and leaves delving gnomishly in circular connections leading to closed-form solutions.

>Visual design: patterns on the screen, snow in hell.

Thirty years ago that read like absurdist satire about Motif-era configurability. Today it reads like someone accidentally describing prompting, tool use, and semantic navigation -- naming the operations in words, then retrieving them -- while standing in Borges' Library of Babel.

David MacKay said writing is navigating in the library of all possible books. Dasher made that literal: you don't type, you steer through probability space toward the text that already exists as possibility. The Internet Archive is busy saving the books that were written. LLMs collapsed a fuzzy corner of the ones that could be. The hard problem Jojo named is still the hard problem: not generating the infinity, but traversing it wisely -- which is also, annoyingly, the hard problem of community. Infinite possible hangouts. Someone still has to pick a time and open the door.

Dasher: information-efficient text entry - David MacKay, April 19 2007, Google Tech Talk:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ie9Se7FneXE

Speech Dasher: An Efficient Correction Interface for Speech Recognition:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cCF6a00Bcoo

LLMs accidentally built a wing of the Library of Babel. XBorges was always about the card catalog. Dasher was always about steering. The Archive is why any of the cards still exist. And if you build the catalog (or the search party), sometimes they will come.

I ordered a cursed monkey's paw from the ACME catalog, thoughtfully wished for the rest of the monkey, gave him an infinite number of typewriters, told him about Dasher and Bruce Tognazzini Apple ][ Integer BASIC program, and he came up with this:

One Monkey, Infinite Typewriters: What It's Like to Be Me. A Personal Account of Incarnation, Navigation, and the Beautiful Machinery of Existence, By Palm:

https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/examples/adven...

David MacKay's Dasher, Palm On Being Palm, and Tog's "The Infinite Numer of Monkeys":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lL2sw2oYU98

>Le Jojo: Fresh 'n' Clean, speaking out to the way you want to live today; American - All American; doing, a bit so, and even more so.

Please Jojo -- write me. Everyone else: if you know him, please be the person who does the little bit of legwork and taps him on the shoulder.

[DonHopkins]

Tim Pozar and Brewster Kahle CHM Interview by Marc Weber October 29 1996

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u2h2LHRFbNA

Brewster said:

But also the early stuff has got people's dreams. The early people that sort of say -- you know, the early people on the web, like you, doing your dinosaur exhibit. You've got this ability to be able to do something new and different. But at some point, people will just say, "oh, well, you know, you can't do that", and they'll just sort of focus in on all it can do. But in the beginning, you have just amazing things. So I always kept the early logs of WAIS. I thought those would be the most valuable things. Is one of the questions, that people ask of the net. And so I kept all of those logs.

Oh, you have those? Oh yeah. What do people look for? What are people dreaming that the technology can finally answer? And right now already, the web has sort of stagnated, people's idea of it has really focused down to the stuff the technicians have given. But it's the early dreams that we should trying to live up to. So I'm trying to keep some of that alive.

[jambalaya8]

Been thinking a lot about concept and word hijacking/cancellation, lately. Dasher is a good example. Ever notice how this happens? It is one of my concerns about agentic AI.

I haven't thought about Motif in ages, either, incidentally. Another tricky word, of course.

[PaulDavisThe1st]

> > And right now already, the web has sort of stagnated, people's idea of it has really focused down to the stuff the technicians have given

This comment has not aged well at all.

[DonHopkins]

Not as unwell aged as the Dumbold Voting Machine's P. Diddy "Vote or Die" disaster that either electrocuts you or sets you on fire if you choose "Die".

https://donhopkins.medium.com/dumbold-voting-machine-for-the...