[ih] hypertext, was FTP Design

[John Day]

At 13:19 -0700 2012/07/03, Larry Press wrote:
>On 7/3/2012 11:39 AM, John Levine wrote:
>
>>Ted Nelson has been trying to implement his Xanadu model of hypertext
>>since about 1969 when he did some work on a 7090 with punch cards.
>
>Do you mean 1960?  The 7090/4 was pretty well finished by the System 
>360 in 1964.  By 1969, a hypertext experiment would have been 
>interactive.

Not really.  Illinois didn't get its two 360s until 67 and then there 
was a big ruckus because instead of being 5 times faster for student 
jobs, it was 3 times slower.  (The reason turned out to be we weren't 
running the IBM OS on the 7094.)  ;-)

>
>I was on a panel with Ted Nelson at the 1970(?) NCC, and all he had 
>"running" was a cardboard mockup of a portable computer that he 
>envisioned being carried around as a back pack.
>
>I also saw him in the mid-late 70s at an Asilomar workshop at which 
>time he had a small group of people trying to implement Xanadu, but 
>as far as I know, it was never in general use.
>
>He was an imaginative, counter-culture kind of a guy, but his 
>contribution can't be compared to Doug Engelbart's.
>
>Also, Doug acknowledges the influence of Vannevar Bush's 1945 
>article "As we may think" in which he speculates on the idea of 
>networked workstations on which one could publish and link to 
>documents:
>
>http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-may-think/3881/?single_page=true

Yea, we use to be able think way beyond what the hardware can do. 
Now we have the hardware to do rather than think.