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    • AMMDI is an open-notebook hypertext writing experiment, authored by Mike Travers aka mtraven. It's a work in progress and some parts are more polished than others. Comments welcome! More.
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from Tools for Thought
  • The computer revolution has many different aspects, but the one that always excited me the most was the idea that a computer could be a tool for augmenting human intellectual processes and a new medium for thoughtful communication. I was first bequeathed my share of this vision via Ted Nelson, an early influence.
from Gordon Pask
  • One of many odd figures in cybernetics . I met him once (via Ted Nelson) and he offered me a little pink pill which I assume was LSD. Unfortunately at the time I was pretty straight (this was when I was still in high school in Chicago) and so I flushed it.
from org-mode test
  • This should be in org mode, isn't that right Ted Nelson ?
from Lost Visions of the Information Age
  • I suppose Ted Nelson's Xanadu counts; not quite lost though.
from Whole Earth Catalog
  • See Stewart Brand. The Catalog was a major early influence on me, particularly in its stance that one could be interested in anything and pursue anything. There was a Whole Earth Bookstore in Evanston, IL where I grew up, which is where I found both the catalog and Ted Nelson's Computer Lib/Dream Machines. When I went off to MIT I managed to fall in with a bunch of Whole Earth-friendly fellow students who were into alternative energy and other alternatives; later I got to actually share an office with SB himself in the early days of the Media Lab.
from roam
  • I wonder what Ted Nelson thinks of Roam. My take (as a long-ago disciple of his) is that while it's not nearly everything he dreamed of, it is a small step in the right direction at last, after the web and almost everything built on it led us astray. That is to say that it deploys technology to capture and enhance the difficult and subtle processes of real thinking, rather than trampling over them.
from Serial Experiments Lain
  • This came out in 1998, how have I never seen it? Guess I was busy. Has actual Lisp code appearing in Layer 7. And in Layer 9, Ted Nelson!
from A Sense of Rebellion
  • The hero, Warren Brodey sounded to me like just another sixties guru-type guy – and nothing wrong with people like that in general, but he was also a complete failure, his big ideas never materialized into anything coherent. His personal life story (hippie communes and a late turn to Maoism followed by some scammy business schemes) also sounds like just another sixties story. His vocal style is reminiscent of Leary, Ted Nelson, and other rakish gurus of the time (a lot of McLuhan and Negroponte there too). As a tech visionary or as a psychologist, he didn't seem to make any lasting contributions. I mean, his life is nothing to be ashamed of, but I couldn't figure out why it should be interesting.
from Jankiness
  • Jankiness is powerful. I learned this lesson from the fate of the Lisp Machine, a computing environment built by hackers for hackers in which everything was guided by a powerful and minimal esthetic. This very particular quality is beloved by those who experience it, but elusive. Lisp Machine should have taken over the world, but instead they are historical curiosities, buried by their Worse is Better competitors. Whereas Lisp was beautiful, the janky Unix/C software was hardy. Ted Nelson's vision of hypertext was beautiful, the real-world internet is layers of jank. In both its architecture and uses.
from Obstinancy
  • Ted Nelson is an example of someone whose obstinacy didn't serve him very well – he stuck to his guns about his vision but as a result couldn't get it built (despite being on the opposite end of the charm spectrum from someone like Stallman)
from About
  • The first is more or less meant to be read like any other document; the other is more like an open notebook project. Parts of it are essay-like but other parts are collections of rough notes or pointers to content that doesn't exist yet. The two parts are somewhat intertwingled (to use a term of Ted Nelson's)
from Media Science Heroes
  • Ted Nelson
    • his Dream Machines is especially relevant here; it's basically a catalog of new (in 1974) technologies for thinking and expression.
from Stewart Brand
  • He was an early influence on me through the Catalog, which I found as a teenager at about the same time I found Ted Nelson's Computer Lib, which shared a similar sixties alternative esthetic. Big books that quite obviously were made differently from normal books, and that were saying something different, something that could only be expressed in this ungainly and rough form.
Twin Pages

Ted Nelson

30 Oct 2021 - 01 Oct 2025
Open in Logseq
    • Ted Nelson is a famous computer visionary, best known for coining the word hypertext. He was not the first person to see the huge potential of computers to enhance human thought, but I certainly learned about that from him – his book Computer Lib ∕ Dream Machines was an early influence. That was the first time I encountered the notion that computational technology could be a vehicle for thought and expression, that it was a medium and could serve as a prosthesis for the mind.
    • Ted was not the only one, or the first, to see the possibilities. Others like Alan Kay, and Seymour Papert, and Doug Engelbart were doing pioneering work about at this time, but they weren՚t self-publishing gloriously ragged books for a young person like me to find prowling around the local scene in Evanston IL in the mid-70s.
    • He's since got quite a bit of recognition as a tech visionary, but nobody has taken his ideas seriously enough. We have hypertext of a sort – you are reading an example – but it's a far cry from what Ted envisioned. These days Ted has the attitude of someone who has been very patiently trying to get people to see some obvious good things, and has been frustrated at every turn, and running out of time, but is still doing his best to make people wake up.

    • Elsewhere

      • The video of his eulogy for Doug Engelbart is quite something. Full of rage and bitterness as well as love. You do not normally see intense emotions like these on display at the Computer History Museum. They resonate for me – I'm not a visionary like Ted, my frustrations are not as sharply drawn as his are, but the sorry state of computational media compared to what it could be is a fucking tragedy and I'm glad at least one person is there to say it.
      • Ted versus The Media Lab - YouTube Media Lab
        • His philosophy of software design: look right, feel good, come across clearly (Media Lab was the opposite, in his view). "self-revealing" UIs.
        • Not sure he is fair to the Media Lab but I'd concur with his negative view of Negroponte. Ted was a visionary, Negroponte had no vision whatsoever but was good at coralling people who did and getting them funding from the powers that be.

    • Decent Writing Systems

    • I first got into this as a writer; all I wanted was a decent writing system that would run on a computer. Little did I realize the immensity of what that entailed, or that for some reason my work and approach would engender indignation and anger wherever I went. There is a fiction that everybody in these fields is doing something fundamentally scientific and technical, an d this fiction is usually upheld in carefully enacted mutual playlets. Trying to cut through that and say , "Let's build a home for mankind that will at last be shaped to fit man's mind, " does not seem to generate immediate warmth and welcome.

    • Earlier

      • Thoughts on Ted Nelson (April 2014)
        • Brewster Kahle՚s talk reminded me of another basic way in which the web failed to live up to Nelson՚s dream: whereas the web and other present-day digital technologies are something of a paradise for media consumers, Ted՚s main focus was on the creator, that is, writers and thinkers. He wanted a system that would support writers and generate new forms of writing and discourse; forms that would contribute to the collective intelligence of humanity. That too doesn՚t seem to have happened. Web media seems to favor the trivial and immediate over deeply structured content.
          • This was true when I wrote it but I think Roam is a big step in the right direction.