Once upon a time, in the ancient web1-era of the late 90s… a public symposium was held at Stanford University to celebrate the 30th anniversary of Doug Engelbart’s 1968 “Mother of All Demos”) and all that it represented and inspired with futurist Paul Saffo as Master of Ceremony.
What we have left today, almost 25 years into the future, is a low quality Youtube video of some of the event’s sessions which is not very watchable due to old analog video recording techniques and an annoying constant audio hum.
Ted Nelson’s incredible talk about his ongoing 90s’ work is hidden about an hour into this two-hours video. As of June 2022, this ancient analog relic has 942 views.
If you don’t know who Ted Wilson is then you should. In his own words, he’ll probably be mostly remembered as the inventor of the BACK button. He also pioneered the concepts of modern multimedia and hyper-textuality as far as they relate to digital products, and he authored a highly influential early 70s computer culture book called ComputerLib / DreamMachines that you should also read.
So 942 seems very wrong. Imo, this talk should be mandatory watching for all digital product designers and managers as it is overflowing with thought-provoking ideas and insights from a singular, independent non-conformist American thinker who has spent decades trying to understand how computers can finally take us beyond the era of the printed word into an era of interconnected media inter-webs and higher-states of human consciousness and civilization.
These ideas are especially relevant for us again in 2022, as some of us work on reimagining web2 and on bringing about a greatly improved web3.
Thinking recently about web3 products, user experiences, mass adoption, and about a young product manager who I’ve been recently mentoring to become a great web3 product guy, I woke up today with a vivid memory of some of Ted’s arguments from this talk that struck me as important, original and insightful. Some noted colorful examples…
Design is war, agreement between people is a miracle, software is an interactive movie with no director, Windows are four-walled prisons, computers are just advanced paper simulators, most software is designed by engineers for clerks or for their software companies upper management, and the computer business is about the politics of standardization.
It took me quite some time to find the video again online, but I managed to do so and watched the whole thing twice this morning. I believe that Ted’s ideas are best introduced by reading from the source…
Watching the video again, about 25 years after it was recorded, strikes me how much Doug’s (and Ted’s) revolution is still unfinished. Windows still sucks. Most software frustrates billions of people on a daily basis. Most of the 3B people who are online use a clunky mobile OS called Android, and nobody sane likes using his bank or his kids school mobile app and website. We still have Microsoft, Oracle and Amazon around — gigantic tech firms that build products and services that mostly have poor user experiences. They still mostly rely on other strategies such as vendor lock-in and other competitive moats for generating massive amounts of revenue and their users are mostly hostages of their services due to lack of more satisfying and self-empowering competitive solutions. The only tech company which seems to get what Ted is talking about is Apple. The Apple Watch 7 is the best product I’ve used since I first got my hands on the original iPad. It is clear that Apple management has been listening, at least to some extent, although at times it takes years for the company to fix obvious serious usability and customer issues in their products. Magsafe anyone?
I believe that Ted’s presentation is more relevant than ever, especially for young product designers and managers who wish to delight users, build great human-machine journeys and achieve user happiness and product market fits.
I couldn’t find a good transcript of it online. So, I decided to spend the weekend transcribing and editing the badly close-captioned Youtube video, in hope that it can make Ted’s important ideas and insights more accessible to more people.
So, without further ado, here it is. I hope you enjoy it and maybe even learn a thing or two from it…
I will introduce Ted in a second, but first I want to run a brief video calculated to absolutely infuriate him…
And we have Ted Nelson to blame for this, because it was his phrase Hypertext which he coined in the early 1960s that led a tortured path down to the minds of some people at Apple who invented that — the knowledge yuppy of the 1990s.
Ted’s done some very interesting things on the way. In the 70s he wrote the book computerLib. I was actually a quite normal undergraduate at the time, and I read the book and it sort of messed up my life, and I’m sure some of you in this room have had the same experience.
He, of course, went on to start project Xanadu** which is to hypertext what Gaudi is to cathedrals**. Still under way.
He is presently a visiting professor at Yale University and at the University of Southampton. He’s deep into developing Xanadu and some other things that are equally fascinating.
Ted once said also he’s about to embark on a new adventure. This is a first for Ted. This will be the first time in his career that Ted has only spoken for 20 minutes. I’m hoping you all help me encourage him to keep to his promise…
Once I heard Ted say “a long time ago I took a long turn”, and it is absolutely true, and we are all deeply grateful that Ted got lost. Ted, it’s all yours…
Ted Nelson
I love and hate paper. I have more of it than anyone I know. Stanford University has asked for it. They don’t know what they’re getting into, but since childhood I have been outraged by the imprisonment implicit in paper.
Having to write to length because there isn’t enough paper in the magazine or book. Having to truncate lines of thought because they have just banged their nose on the right margin of the page. Having to stick to the subject which of course always means sticking to the subject as someone else sees it.
I believe there are no subjects actually in the popular sense, because the word subject, in the popular sense, suggests sharp lines of demarcation which is precisely what the mind should not be restricted to.
So, a little on background. I’ll try to be quick. The mandatory story, because I’m not an engineer, nor a good scientist, I was gonna be an intellectual / showbiz guy.
When I was 11, in the June 1949 issue of The Reader’s Digest I read about a guy named Buckminster Fuller who had invented his own geometry and I said ‘Wow, you’re allowed to do that?’, and I was keenly aware of new media, I grew up as a radio child. I still remember vaguely sitting on my grandfather’s knee when we were listening to a symphony and the Pearl Harbour bombing was announced. I also remember playing with my trains with the radio on, and hearing the news of Hiroshima which I conveyed to my grandparents.
At the age of about 12, I sat behind my father who was a director in the early days of live TV. One of his greatest moments was a show called Mamma, a family comedy show at 8:00 p.m. on Friday night sponsored by Maxwell House Coffee, and there was no videotape, there were no retakes, and camera one went out on the opening shot, and flawlessly and seamlessly he talked the whole thing through on the microphone, and nobody knew anything that gone wrong. It was magnificent.
At the age 13 I read a book called the Voyage of the Space Beagle by A. E. van Vogt. The narrator said he was a Nexialist, someone who finds connections, and I typed up little business cards calling myself a Nexialist, and about the same time, a movie opened with an astonishing storyline because it was one story told six times over. I think I saw it three times. The year was about 1950, and the film was called Rashomon, but essentially about versioning, about the fact that there are many stories in the big city, and you’ll never know which one is correct so you have to tell them all.
In college I majored in extracurriculars. By the time I got out, I don’t say I’d done these things well, but I had produced an LP, I made a movie. I’ve done the world’s first rock musical in which Van Damme played a spy. I had done newspaper and magazine stuff, and the fighting over creative control seemed to me the center of the universe. We had a dress rehearsal, we had a fight, my stage manager and I, he said we’re gonna do this his way and I walked off, and ten minutes later I came back and he capitulated. His name was David Baltimore. I don’t know if he’s still in show business.
In any case, I was outraged by the confines of paper, and the problem of version management and ever-changing versions, whether it’s a script, or a seminar paper that’s due at 9:00 a.m. How do you manage the swirl of ever-changing thoughts and different ideas? How do you keep track? I was resolved to take notes and understand more than most people did… and how to express minority views? There are minority political groups in our country. Minority religions which are satirized in the present, and you can never find out what they actually think… and finally, and most importantly, the individuals fight for creative control versus the obtuse shallow and conventional majority.
So, unable to decide between intellect and show business, I went to graduate school, and there took a course in computers. Bang! lightning bolt, heavens open, it was all obvious! because, you know, I saw men suddenly working at screens in darkened rooms. There, this is the next thing, and for the rest of human life we will be working at screens, and so the question is how to design tomorrow’s? What will replace a paper for tomorrow? But **it had to be better than paper, it had to do everything that paper did, and be better, for example, everything had to be annotated. **So, I started designing. This was 1960.
The problem is, most people still don’t understand it yet, is that all documents are parallel. Consider a well-known example, the Bible. What is the Bible? Well, it begins with the Hebrew Torah, and wait a minute, there’s that nifty Hebrew Torah that just came out of Ethiopia that’s only, what, the first four books? They separated early… and then there are the different translations, and then there’s that New Testament, thousands of different translations. Consider the subtle differences between the King James version, and this version, and that version, all of which essentially have important differences from a theological point of view. Now what is the Bible? it’s all of them.
Now, some people may only want you to see one version, uh-huh, but that’s the whole point! The whole point is that the Bible is all of them, and being able to see them side-by-side.
Now, even in the 50s we had the Interpreter’s Bible which is the Bible side-by-side. Shakespeare, Rahsoomon, it’s all one. That was the first epiphany.
The second epiphany, pivoting to interactive software. It is gonna be interactive on screens, and what is the computer screen?
I mean I was frozen when I saw a picture and animation of a map in 1960, a map on a computer screen. Holy Smoke! This is gonna replace the printed word, and once we do that, what does it become? Obviously, interactive software, as Brett helped put it in a way, and as I state now to my classes, interactive software is a branch of moviemaking.** This is not a metaphor. Not an analogy. Interactive software is a branch of moviemaking and virtually most computer science is irrelevant.**
What is relevant is studying your Wells, studying your Hitchcock, studying your good documentaries, because right now we’re in the stage of software which compares to the movie business before 1904.
Between 1892 and 1904, movies were made by the cameraman, because he understood the equipment, and that’s exactly where we are now.
In 1904 they invented the director. The director. What was the director? It was the guy who didn’t have to know how to load a camera, didn’t know how to play a violin, dance, fence or hang the lights, but he had to know how to make those effects come together in a unified experience.
Very simple rhetorical question for you: why are video games so much better designed than office software? The answer is preposterously simple. Video games are designed by people who love to play video games. Office software is designed by people who want to do something else on the weekend.
Now, what does show business teach you? It teaches you that design is war. Design is war. It’s a power struggle between the producers, the directors, the author’s and everybody who’s going to be involved, and now we see it in the following form…
What is the software business about? The software business is about the politics of standardization, and almost nothing else.
So, all the politics comes down to this one thing. For example, Eisenberg Kingdom Brunel in 1820 said that if we had railways where if the two tracks were 20 feet apart, we’d be able to drive those trains at 200 miles an hour and they’d be smooth, and he was right. He also knew that ships could be made of iron and nobody believed him, but that’s what happened.
According to the one version I heard the opposite party’s man came around and got his workmen drunk the night before the queen’s or king’s inspection party, and the result was that we got the present railroad standard where the railroad width of the two tracks is the same as the distance between the wheels of the Roman chariots, for traditional reasons we needn’t get into.
So the problem is always how you establish the standards.
Everybody who has been working on something that everybody in the computer field with four years of experience has worked on: something that is better than what’s out there.
But, the problem is how do you get your standard done? The great line that you have to know from Hollywood is that everybody wants to direct.
So, huh, who gets to direct? Who gets to make those decisions? Right now it’s committees that design the software and the guy who does some difficult subroutine gets to do the little interface pop-up for that, and what we have is today’s garbage.
So, I tried to explain to people in 1962 that, you know, we’d be reading and writing on screens, it would be hypertext, and the copyright issue should be solved because the original quote we bought from the original publisher, and it comes instantly, and I never talked slowly, and people would say ‘is it like a tape?’ and only years later did I realize that the answer is yes.
Now, I visited Doug in the spring of 1967 because we talked about me coming out to work for him, and two things did the trick, well, several. One was that I just love the guy, of course, as everyone does, and then I thought it would be light pants, hey well, obviously it’s most things much better, and, also, next door there was that place that sold skateboards. I thought, oh wow I’m gonna ride skateboards, so out of those came that I skateboard a little while in my 30s but I quit, but the thing about Doug was that his emphasis on collaboration seemed to be completely naive.
I’ve always been very sensitive to conflict, and the notion that you can bring agreement… agreement between people is a miracle, okay and it has nothing to do with love, right? Does really loving somebody mean you get along with them well?
But, one of the things, one of the things that moves me greatly seeing this audience here, because it shows that the emphasis on collaboration and working together does have a meaning, can have results, and I’m also learning that working with people in Japan.
Okay, so the other side of it, of course, is still how to empower the dissenter and how to empower the person who wants to package the material differently? Because in the old world of media every information package gets the lid nailed on shut, you can’t reuse it. You can sort of point to it vaguely from all sides…
Now, let’s talk a little about today’s horrible computer world. To quote Eric Raymond
Microsoft is not the problem. Microsoft is the symptom.
So the problem is how do we alert people’s intelligence to what can be, rather than taking it down to the lowest possible common denominator? and this is, of course, at the center of Doug’s work.
Today it is paper. We’ve got to have media which is better than paper. Let’s just begin… you can flip through paper. Opening a file on a computer screen is like opening a packing crate. The hierarchical assumption of structure in today’s software… we have hierarchical directories that were accidentally invented in like 1947… we’re going to put in them, all this stuff… Well, let’s make a file with the names of files, right? So, the hierarchical assumption has passed on to us which assumes that there is no overlap between things we do, you work on one thing and then you finish that, and you put it away neatly, and now you work on something else. There is no overlap. There is no interpenetration. Projects are never redefined. We don’t have to change our terminology once we’ve started…. In other words, today’s software was designed by and for clerks and engineers, but not for people who think, or who have paid to think. Let me restate that, not for people who are incessantly plagued by problems of rethinking.
Now, the Macintosh from the PC, to me this is Tweedledum and Tweedledee… okay? and it masks that this, the so-called GUI I would rather call it the Pooi — the Parc User Interface, because there are so many millions of graphical user interfaces possible, and yet we are stuck with one in which we have a single fixed little area called the desktop. I don’t know why, I have never seen a vertical desktop, where the icons are in a fixed size, and then they open to flat windows which don’t have any perspective, and don’t connect.
So, calling a hierarchical directory a folder is like calling a prison guard a counselor. Now, as Zimbardo demonstrated a few hundred feet from here on the Stanford campus, anyone will behave like a prison guard under circumstances that put you in control of people like a prison guard, and hierarchical directories create fractured and cut-up thoughts.
Word-processing is a geek’s notion of what writers need in the same way that MIDI is a geek’s notion of music. You see, in both cases, misled by the notation, oh, those are characters on a page that resemble characters, and those are just notes on paper… Well, we’ll just play those notes, okay? So now we get MIDI and we get WordPress, where the problem in writing is the duality of text between the items.
The items you wish to include and whose position you wish to track from version to version, and you want to make sure you get in, and you want to make sure you reused, and the surface structure which is the knitted sentences resulting from those ideas… Those items projecting upward. Okay, so we have this duality forever. Doug understood that from the beginning as emerging outline processing and text.
Now this profit without honor business is all completely true, but I was misled by this old slogan:
In the country of the blind the one-eyed man is king.
The real slogan ought to be:
In the country of the one-eyed, the two-eyed man better watch himself.
Because people don’t like your perspective… and the lack of appreciation of Doug… it’s like you stand next to the Empire State Building. You don’t know how tall it is. You just know that it’s taller than you… and a lot of people resent that. And so just to keep standing for somebody like Doug to keep standing with all the disappointments and all the crud is just a remarkable and wonderful achievement and I’m very, very happy with it.
The software industry and the understanding of software is not merely about the blind men and the elephant. It’s the blind venture capitalists trying to take parts of the elephant public. Like this trunk thing can give us a three year exit strategy…
Integrated software… Well, Doug knew from the beginning that software had to be integrated but for most people it’s like trying to explain the idea of cuisine to someone who’s only eating at McDonald’s… There’s cuisine. Let’s see what would happen if you put the fries, and the burger, and the shake next to each other on a tray, or you could, you know, be really radical and dip the fries in the burger and in the shake and… Windows.
Or, you could put the burger on your head, the french fries up your nose and pour the shake over your head — that was called Lotus Symphony…
I dearly love Mitch Kapur, but I finally found out how Lotus Symphony was actually designed. It’s true. I had dinner with Ray Ozzy who created a lot of Symphony and apparently inspired by a conversation we had, that I don’t even remember, and he said he was working at Lotus and he said, okay I’d like you to back my idea and Mitch said okay, I’ll make a deal, here’s the Lotus wishlist, the things we’ve had requests from customers. Can you implement it exactly as stated? Okay, so Ray programmed this very carefully, exactly according to the list and got backing to develop Lotus Notes and the list was released as Lotus Symphony. That’s software design for you.
But now you see we’re in this era of a paper simulation — WYSIWYG. Doug already mentioned WYSIWYG. WYSIWYG, you see, it’s one of those misleading terms. It’s like what you see is what you get… What do you mean? What I see is what I see, right? and I’m getting it right? Well, not quite, because, you see, what it really means is we’re using what you get when you print it out. In other words, we are tying your activity to the destiny of paper.
We are using the computer as a paper simulator which is like tearing the wings off a bus of a 747 and driving it on the highway.
Now the usual story that this evolved from at Xerox Parc because they wanted to make computers simple for the man on the street… Actually the truth is, they did it because they wanted to make the idea of computers clear to Xerox management. Xerox was a paper walloping company and they understood paper, so the whole point was to use the image they have, and so that’s like the Roman chariot creating the width of the tracks… the Xerox upper management mindset has created today’s computer system.
Just think of all the imaginary forests we’ve had to cut down to create to simulate paper on the screen… but what’s worse, is that we are stuck in that prison of paper, those four walls…
So, let’s go to the slide please. This is a slide which I published in 1972 in the Proceedings of a conference.
This is the mock-up of how computer windows should look. 1972, which I believe was a couple of years before the design of today’s prevailing windows if we are Parc.
So, we should be able to point out the connections of the contents of one window from another window, so you can write your commentaries. You can show your links explicitly point to point. We’ve got to have that.
People would say “Oh Ted, you don’t understand how computers work”. Wrong context of discourse. This is how computers must work, and if it’s not convenient for you buddy, it’s time…
A word about education. People ask me what do you mean by education? Do you mean the process by which people become educated? Great! you mean the educational establishment? Thank you, no. The moment you establish a curriculum you’ve lost it.
Do you know what Curriculum means in Latin? it means, and this is not well publicized, it means little racetrack, okay? So, as soon as you have a curriculum you have winners and losers, right?
So curriculum creates the educational system in exactly the same way that the time slot creates broadcasting as we know it today.
So, here on the screen, this is a close-up of my proposed windowing system.
We will now go control-C, double-click, so this was done, by the way, with Ivan. This was programmed by a Professor in Heath at the University of Southampton according to the specs for my 1972 system.So, this is how Windows look today, yep, you know, they are, okay, windows…
This is how they ought to look, and these linked connections should be able to follow the material as you scroll, so that we can actually start to write connections on material that can follow the real inter-connections of the material and not be confined to the four walls of Windows we know.
So two cheers for the web. The web is intrinsically broken. It doesn’t have version management, doesn’t have rights management and the reason I find all too late, I read a paper that explains why the web beats Xanadu, it’s an article by Richard Gabriel written in 1987 called Good News, Bad News and how to win big, and why the thing that does the first 50% flashily wins in software.
Trying to add version management and rights management to HTML is like trying to graft arms and legs on a hamburger.
Okay, so I will leave the last word to Doug in this little video clip I made six years ago…
There is a lot of potential out there for Humanity and once you get a picture of that potential being very much more than what you see, and you think that there’s a way to get there, then it’s very hard to set that aside, to do something practically in my favor. I really think that the world in humanity could climb a really effective ladder — capability, human potential, and I think we could go at it with the right strategy.So that’s what I did — get committed to it somehow.