A Personal History of Hypertext

A list of readings, online and on the page

Paul Kahn, October 2010

Vannevar Bush

Quotations from“As We May Think,” Vannevar Bush, Atlantic Monthly, July, 1945http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/194507/bush

Consider a future device for individual use, which is a sort of mechanized private file and library. It needs a name, and, to coin one at random, "memex" will do. A memex is a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory.

It consists of a desk, and while it can presumably be operated from a distance, it is primarily the piece of furniture at which he works. On the top are slanting translucent screens, on which material can be projected for convenient reading. There is a keyboard, and sets of buttons and levers. Otherwise it looks like an ordinary desk.

[…]

Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the memex and there amplified. The lawyer has at his touch the associated opinions and decisions

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of his whole experience, and of the experience of friends and authorities. The patent attorney has on call the millions of issued patents, with familiar trails to every point of his client's interest. The physician, puzzled by a patient's reactions, strikes the trail established in studying an earlier similar case, and runs rapidly through analogous case histories, with side references to the classics for the pertinent anatomy and histology. The chemist, struggling with the synthesis of an organic compound, has all the chemical literature before him in his laboratory, with trails following the analogies of compounds, and side trails to their physical and chemical behavior.

The historian, with a vast chronological account of a people, parallels it with a skip trail which stops only on the salient items, and can follow at any time contemporary trails which lead him all over civilization at a particular epoch. There is a new profession of trail blazers, those who find delight in the task of establishing useful trails through the enormous mass of the common record. The inheritance from the master becomes, not only his additions to the world's record, but for his disciples the entire scaffolding by which they were erected.

Computer Pioneers: Bush biography and photographshttp://www.kerryr.net/pioneers/bush.htmhttp://www.kerryr.net/pioneers/gallery/bush.htm

Internet Pioneers Biographyhttp://www.ibiblio.org/pioneers/bush.html

online French translation (partial): Tel que nous pourrions penser http://www.archipress.org/episteme/vannevar.htm

Memex animation (for Mac or Windows) on the Kahn+Associates web sitehttp://www.kahnplus.com/publication/fr/online.htm

Foreseeing the Future: The legacy of Vannevar Bush by Erin Malone, Boxes and Arrowshttp://www.boxesandarrows.com/archives/foreseeing_the_future_the_legacy_of_vannevar_bush.php

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Ted Nelson

Quotations from “Literary Machines 93.1”

At your screen of tomorrow you will have access to all the world’s published work: all the books, all the magazines, all the photographs, the recordings, the movies. (And to new kinds of publications, created especially for the interactive screen.)

You will be able to bring any published work to your screen, or any part of a published work.

You will be able to make links – comments, personal notes, or other connections – between places in documents, and leave them there for others (as well as yourself) to follow later. You may even publish these links.

Royalty to each publisher will be automatic, as materials are delivered over the network. Each piece delivered will be paid for automatically, from the user’s account to the publisher’s account, when the user receives the piece sent for.

Any document may quote another, because the quoted part is brought – and bought – from the original at the instant of request, with automatic royalty payment and credit to the originator.

Literary Machines 93.1, Mindful Press, Sausalito CA, 1992 Computer Lib / Dream Machines, Microsoft Press, 1987 (1974) Xanalogical Structure, Needed Now More than Ever: Parallel Documents,

Deep Links to Content, Deep Versioning, and Deep Re-Use , in ACM Computing Surveys 31(4), December 1999, http://www.cs.brown.edu/memex/ACM_HypertextTestbed/papers/60.html

TransLiterature In Brief, in NEW Magazine 1_2005, September 2005,http://www.new-mag.com/PDF/Translit_In_Brief.pdf

Current teaching and lecturesTed Nelson Homepage Author's Website at the University of Oxford http://ted.hyperland.com/

Xanadu Project http://www.xanadu.net/

Xanadu Australiahttp://www.xanadu.com.au/

Project Xanadu Article on Wikipediahttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu

La Transliterature de Ted NelsonArticle on Ted Nelson's presentation of Translit™ at the ICHIM Conference

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2005 in Paris.http://www.conseilaction.com/viewPage.php?id=87

mproveTed Nelson bibliography, with links to online textshttp://www.mprove.de/diplom/referencesNelson.html

Visionary Lays Into the Web Ted Nelson interview on BBC Go Digital, 2001, text and recordinghttp://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/1581891.stm

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Douglas Engelbart

Quotations from “Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework”

By "augmenting human intellect" we mean increasing the capability of a man to approach a complex problem situation, to gain comprehension to suit his particular needs, and to derive solutions to problems. Increased capability in this respect is taken to mean a mixture of the following: more-rapid comprehension, better comprehension, the possibility of gaining a useful degree of comprehension in a situation that previously was too complex, speedier solutions, better solutions, and the possibility of finding solutions to problems that before seemed insoluble. And by "complex situations" we include the professional problems of diplomats, executives, social scientists, life scientists, physical scientists, attorneys, designers--whether the problem situation exists for twenty minutes or twenty years. We do not speak of isolated clever tricks that help in particular situations. We refer to a way of life in an integrated domain where hunches, cut-and-try, intangibles, and the human "feel for a situation" usefully co-exist with powerful concepts, streamlined terminology and notation, sophisticated methods, and high-powered electronic aids.

Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework. Summary Report AFOSR-3223 under Contract AF 49(638)-1024, SRI Project 3578 for Air Force Office of Scientific Research, Stanford Research Institute, Menlo Park, Ca., October 1962.

Bootstrap Institute web site, Engelbart’s organization todayhttp://www.bootstrap.org

NLS Demo, December 9, 1968 on MouseSite, Stanford Universityhttp://sloan.stanford.edu/mousesite/1968Demo.html

NLS Demo on Google Video: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8734787622017763097&q=engelbart#

Bootstrapping: Douglas Engelbart, Coevolution, and the Origins of Personal Computing, Thierry Bardini, Standford University Press, 2000.

Wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Engelbart

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The NLS system (circa 1968) included: Mixture of text and graphics Hypertext links Outline processing View control of text and graphic data Mouse input pointing device 5-finger keyboard input device Collaborative work space Shared pointing device Video conferencing

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Alan Kay

Quotations from “Personal Dynamic Media”

Imagine having your own self-contained knowledge manipulator in a portable package the size and shape of an ordinary notebook. Suppose it had enough power to outrace your senses of sight and hearing, enough capacity to store for later retrieval thousands of page-equivalents of reference mterials, poems, letters, recipes, records, drawings, animations, musical scores, waveforms, dynamic simulations, and anything else you would like to remember and change.

We envision a device as small and portable as possible which could both take in and give out information in quantities approaching that of human sensory systems. Visual output should be, at the least, of higher quality than what can be obtained from newsprint. Audio output should adhere to similar high-fidelity standards.

There should be no discernible pause between cause and effect. One of the metaphors we used when designing such a system was that of a musical instrument, such as a flute, which is owned by its user and responds instandly and consistently to its owner’s wishes. Imagine the absurdity of a one-second delay between blowing a note and hearing it!

These civilized desires for flexibility, resolution, and response lead to the conclusion that a user of dymamic personal medium needs several hundred times as much power as the average adult typically enjoys from timeshared computing. This means that we should either build a new resource several hundred times the capacity of current machines and share it (very difficult and expensive), or we should investigate the possibility of giving each person his own powerful machine. We choose the second approach.

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Dynabook illustration, 1972

“A Personal Computer for Children of All Ages”, Xerox PARC, Aug 1972 “Personal Dynamic Media”, Computer 10(3):31-41, March 1977 Biography

http://ei.cs.vt.edu/~history/GASCH.KAY.HTML The Computer Revolution Has Not Happened Yet (EDUCOM ’98 Video)

http://www.educause.edu/conference/e98/webcast98.html The Dynabook Revisited, Online Symposium on Book Culture at the

Crossroads, 2003http://www.honco.net/os/kay.html

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Intermedia etc.

Hypertext with text, graphics, timeline, animation, videoAnchors and Links collected in Webs(circa 1985-1990)

Hypertext at Brown from George Landow’s History of Hypertexthttp://www.cyberartsweb.org/cpace/ht/HTatBrown/Intermedia.html

IRIS Hypermedia Services" Bernard J. Haan, Paul Kahn, Victor A. Riley, Norman K. Meyrowitz, and James H. Coombs, Communications of the ACMhttp://www.kahnplus.com/download/pdf/irishypermediaservices.pdf

Intermedia webs now on the Web:

Cyberspace, Hypertext, & Critical Theory http://www.cyberartsweb.org/cpace/

The Victorian Webhttp://www.victorianweb.org/

Post-Colonial and Post-Imperial Literature in Englishhttp://www.postcolonialweb.org/

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General Suggested Reading:

History:From Memex to Hypertext, Vannevar Bush and the Mind’s Machine, James M. Nyce and Paul Kahn, Academic Press, 1990.

Bootstrapping: Douglas Engelbart, Coevolution, and the Origins of Personal Computing, Thierry Bardini, Standford University Press, 2000 Tools for Thought, the History and Future of Mind-Expanding Technology, Howard Rheingold, MIT Press, 2000. (second edition)

Hypertext 3.0: Critical Theory and New Media in an Era of Globalization, George P. Landow, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005.http://www.press.jhu.edu/books/title_pages/8902.html

GLUT : Mastering Information Through the Ages, Alex Wright, Joseph Henry Press, 2007.http://www.alexwright.org/glut/Google talk: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72nfrhXroo8&feature=related

Information Architecture:

INFORMATION ANXIETY 2, Richard Saul Wurman, Que, 2001.

Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, 2nd edition, Louis Rosenfeld and Peter Morville, O’Reilly 2002http://books.google.com/books?id=hLdcLklZOFAC&printsec=frontcover&dq=louis+rosenfeld&ei=wdlAS6WpD5jMzQSRiZy8Bg&cd=1#v=onepage&q=&f=false

The Elements of User Experience: User-Centered Design for the Web, Jesse James Garrett, New Riders, 2002http://www.jjg.net/elements/

Mapping Web Sites, Paul Kahn and Krzysztof Lenk, Rotovision, 2001http://www.kahnplus.com/download/publication/mapwebsitesbookchapter4.pdf

Atlas of Cyberspace, Martin Dodge and Rob Kitchin, Harlow, UK: Addison-Wesley, 2001http://www.kitchin.org/atlas/index.html

Information Design Workbook, Kim Baer & Jill Vacarra, Rockport, 2008

Designing Universal Knowledge, Gerlinde Schuller, Lars Muller Publishers, 2008http://www.theworldasflatland.net/report1.htm

Essays

Getting from here to there: Travel Planner User Interface for Paris and London" Paul Kahn 2+3D No. 18 (I - 2006).http://www.kahnplus.com/download/pdf/HereToThere_PK+EN.pdf

The Value of Connections, Paul Kahnhttp://www.kahnplus.com/download/pdf/Value-of-Connections.pdf

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"Applications of isometric projection for visualizing web sites" Paul Kahn, Krzysztof Lenk, and Piotr Kaczmarekhttp://www.kahnplus.com/download/pdf/Kahn=Lenk=Kacz.pdf

"Principles of Typography for User Interface Design" Paul Kahn and Krzysztof Lenkhttp://www.kahnplus.com/download/pdf/uitype_interactions.pdf

Useful Websites

Information Aestheticshttp://infosthetics.com/

Interactive architecturehttp://www.interactivearchitecture.org/

Boxes and Arrowshttp://www.boxesandarrows.com/

Visual Complexityhttp://www.visualcomplexity.com/vc/

User Experience Deliverableshttp://semanticstudios.com/publications/semantics/000228.php

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