being Ted Nelson?
June 13, 2002
after missing the opportunity to see Ted Nelson the other night, I've been poking around looking into what the man's been up to for the past, oh, thirty years - ever since he first dreamed up this whole wacky idea about hypertext and linked documents (in the 1960s, no less)
Turns out Nelson's latest endeavor is something called ZigZag, a kind-of sort-of successor to the mythical Xanadu project that, though it never quite came to fruition, nonetheless served as the direct conceptual foundation for Tim Berners-Lee's original World Wide Web program (and so acknowledged by T-BL himself).
I came across these pencil sketches of new hyperspace design metaphors.
man oh man. crazy genius.
File under: User Experience
_____________________« wish i'd known... | demoware on a Spielberg budget »
GLUT:
Mastering Information Through the Ages
“A penetrating and highly entertaining meditation on the information age and its historical roots.”
—Los Angeles Times
“A fascinating tour of the many ways that humans have collected, organized and shared information.”
—Publisher's Weekly
“A readable romp through the history of information processing, from the origins of writing to the emergence of libraries and finally the World Wide Web.”
—New Scientist
Now Available From:
