Timeo Danaos....

Perhaps the most neglected pioneer in computing is Ted Nelson, who came up with most of the ideas of hypertext and linking, but got sidetracked for most of his life with the ill-fated Project Xanadu. One of my favourite computing puns is "I fear the geeks bearing gifts". So putting them together is an irresistible combination:

Whether you love the computer world the way it is, or consider it a nightmare honkytonk prison, you'll giggle and rage at Ted Nelson's telling of computer history, its personalities and infights.

Computer movies, music, 3D; the eternal fight between Jobs and Gates; the tangled stories of the Internet and the World Wide Web; all these and more are punchily told in brief chapters on many topics such as The Web Browser Salad, Voting Machines, Google, Web 2.0 and much more. These short stories make great reading – it's a book to dip in and out of.

I have to say that's not exactly the book I would have expected Nelson to write, but then he's full of surprises.... (Via Iterating Towards Openness.)

I'll Have What Doug's Having

Doug Engelbart is The Man: he invented practically everything clever in recent computing, from the mouse through to hypertext. One of his lesser-known but more ambitious projects was the Open Hyperdocument System. Or rather is, since it's back as HyperScope 1.0:

The HyperScope is a high-performance thought processor that enables you to navigate, view, and link to documents in sophisticated ways. It's the brainchild of Doug Engelbart, the inventor of hypertext and the mouse, and is the first step towards his larger vision for an Open Hyperdocument System.

The HyperScope is written in JavaScript using the Dojo toolkit and works in Firefox (recommended) and Internet Explorer. It uses OPML as its base file format. It is open source and available under the GPL.

In practice, this sounds like fine-grained navigation and presentation of documents (although it seems to be much more). There's even a demo you can try out.

After just a brief perusal of this stuff, I can confidently say I don't really know what's going on. But if it's good enough for Doug, it's good enough for me. (Via Techmeme.)