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hi I'm Ted Nelson I want to talk about the structure of computer documents now most people think they know what electronic documents are because
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they've seen them they've seen Microsoft Word they've seen adob Adobe Acrobat and what are computer documents like they imitate
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paper well when I was learning to write in my teens it seemed to me that paper was a prison four walls
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right and the ideas were constantly trying to escape what is a parenthesis but an idea trying to escape what is a footnote but an idea that tried that jumped off the
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cliff because paper enforces single sequence and there's no room for degression it imposes a particular kind of order in the very nature of the
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structure when I saw the computer I said at last we can escape from the prison of paper and that was what my whole hypertext idea was about in 1960 and
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since contrarily what did the other people do they imitated paper which to me seems totally insane
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the Bravo project at Xerox Park became Microsoft Word the interpress project at Xerox Park became Adobe Acrobat and no
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denters even Doug engelbart system the original while it modeled paper documents had deep linkage whereas uh it seems to me that we need entirely
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different structures where are the marginal notes why can't you make marginal notes on on Microsoft Word or Adobe Acrobat and that's just the beginning what do you want in electronic documents that is not possible on paper
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well for one thing parallelism you want things on the side marginal notes are one thing that can be on the side but you can also have consider the writing of History what is history it's many parallel streams of events which meet at
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certain points so why not create them as parallel structures that makes it easier to write easier to read um many links now when we say links these days we mean these oneway the oneway
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things that can't overlap and have no types I'm not talking about that we want to have deep links and finally we want to see the origins of content so to me the computer was an opportunity to re
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radically redefine the nature of writing and the nature of the document and I've been on that for the last 47 years so while everybody else was imitating paper uh project Xanadu on its Mountaintop and
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under various difficult circumstances has been endeavoring to get something going that's entirely different from the prevailing Paradigm but if you fight the existing Paradigm it's tough so here is the latest we
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have here we are in zanadu space this is a three-dimensional setup and we see a document of 11 different
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pages now I'm going to fly through it in 3D and you can see the various different connections between the documents there are only 27 I think connections between these 11 pages but you can see how complex they get because we are allowing
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overlap and interconnection of any in any quantity potentially hundreds or millions of links how do we keep them sorted out aha that is the nice touch
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here in the front we have two pages the the current page with the large type and its companion page with the smaller type and this connection is a transclusion that is the same content in
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two places it is not a link it is not represented by link structures it is differently found so here we have in the beginning God created the Heaven and Earth in a quotation and here in the uh
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in the companion document is the origin in the King James Bible now I just made this I just made the companion document the companion page the current page we'll go back to the current page to this current page and step through to
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various documents and we see as we step through the page the connections on this page that the other documents swarf into position it's swoop plus morph they swarf into position and
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the connections become exactly uh readable so one connection at a time we can follow what the uh what the uh connections actually mean even though we are in a huge conglomerate of many
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different connections so that's it that is zanadu space that is the latest version and I hope it'll be a product soon of a uh document with real hypertext and real links in real
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profusion so we have transclusion parallelism a generalized media format so in fact that actually gives us a way of looking at the same media format
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pardon me the same structure can be used to represent audio video and any mix of audio video and text so that you can use this type of Link or Flink as we call it
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floating link for in andout points on audio and video you can edit in place and create arbitrarily Rich transclusion structures of audio and video you know
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you know what I mean by that that you can find the original context of any sound bite or any shot in videos or video or movies see
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this to me is a real representation in depth of literature as it should always have been and anything less is a compromise with tradition and
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shallowness when they first built the Horseless Carriage they were was a socket for a buggy whip why because it made the driver feel better
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if he had a whip even if there was no horse to whip it with similarly to whip with it similarly the techies have imitated the
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conventional media of the past they have imitated paper documents phonograph record tracks radio programs and sequential movies why when we could have
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movies that branch and branch and Branch forever and keep track of them because they have xenical structure and you can make marginal notes and make uh parallel structures of all of them with transclusion as an immediate option at
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all times this is a radical proposal for a completely new different system of media and representing each user as a simultaneous reader and writer which is what we
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really are thank you for your attention
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