Danger Will Robinson
Every now and then you turn the corner or click a link in the floor drops out from under you. The Institute for the Future of the Book occupies a prominent place in my newsreader; it’s usually fairly safe, interesting articles I can skim, but every now and then I hit something like this:
Ted Nelson, who we mention here from time to time, has a new, self-published book out, entitled Geeks Bearing Gifts, which is his own deeply idiosyncratic take on the history of the computer and how we use them, starting from the invention of the alphabet and explaining exactly where things went wrong along the way. Ted Nelson, of course, is the inventor of hypertext among other things; I hope to have an interview with him up here soon.
Xanadu is also famous for being the longest vaporware project in history. If you don’t want to buy the book Nelson provides an interesting précis; here are some interesting outtakes to whet your appetite:
Hierarchy is the official metaphysic of the computer world. (Aristotle, the medieval Catholic Church and the Dewey Decimal System have all reinforced this concept,) Many tekkies think all structure is hierarchical, and have arranged not to see any other kinds. They say if you have a hammer everything looks like a nail. Today’s hierarchical computer tools (especially object-oriented languages and XML) make hierarchy an imposition, not an option.
Phonetic alphabets are only one form of writing, but it’s the form that runs the computer world. Our alphabet derived from the Phoenician; upper case is introduced under Charlemagne in the 800s. Then text is represented electrically– in upper case because God was thought to require it.
A database is any principled arrangement of information that you can look things up in.
But any computer scientist, hacker or teenage programmer can tell you that no amount of studying its external behavior will tell you what it’s going to do on election day. It’s really a video game programmed to look like a democratic input device.
"Email is forever" (unless you want to keep it, in which case you’re more likely to lose it– Murphy’s Law). If you like, you can go voyeuring in the Enron email corpus, placed on line after their court case.
IBM, reacting gradually, builds a huge piece of iron, big as a refrigerator top, much more expensive and unfriendly than the Apple with four times the size and ten times the weight, but it has the IBM name. (Instead of HELLO, its startup program is called AUTOEXEC.BAT– a very bad sign.)
Google now has the largest computer– i.e., unified computer system– in the world (thought to be well over a million processors), with the most reliable operating system in the world– a distributed parallel Linux that never stops, even as disk drives die constantly. (Hey, if something’s missing, how would you know?)
