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hi Ted congratulations on your Fest day I'm so sorry I won't be able to be with you but I found out that I had to stay in Boston this entire week I was trying to get out of something on Thursday so I
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could fly back here Wednesday night but I can't do it so we made this uh video to uh celebrate your day and Bonnie and
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I thought that the most important part of this would be to thank you so much for being responsible for us meeting up falling in love and getting married and
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Bonnie made a little video explaining this and here she is hi I'm Bonnie mcbird and this is how Ted Nelson spawned the movie Tron and a marriage that's lasted more than 30 years the
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year was 1979 I just left Universal Studios to write a movie about a video game inside of a computer there were no personal computers at that time only these in La
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there were many video arcades but only one computer store it was for Homebrew types only I went there and found this book computer live by Ted Nelson I read it cover to cover well cover to middle
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and then upside down and other cover to middle and there was an article about Alan Kay so I went up to Xerox Park and met the guy a half hour interview stretched into hours and Alan K became the technical
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consultant on the movie Tron we spent many happy hours in conversation along Venice and Santa Monica beaches and also dup bars and I wrote a script filled with cool science there was a bit who
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wanted to be a program and there was a video game Warrior who longed to be a human the script was uploaded to park on this and then I went up there and edited the script on the alto computer making
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Tron the first movie script ever to be edited with a word processing program it sold to Disney and after eight new writers and considerable meddling it became the movie Tron groundbreaking yes but Alan and I think the marriage turned
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out B than the movie we thank you Ted [Music] [Applause] Nelson thanks Bon as thoron Wilder's old fortune teller says it is easy to tell the
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future but ask who can tell the past it's not just a memory problem but one of too much complicated detail without enough perspective it would be great if we could go back there and take a look at the world
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Bonnie talks about and to some extent we can some years ago zero decided to clean their warehouse and throw out most of the park data discs here's one of the few that got saved about 100 out of thousands were
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rescued and a few thousand files were recovered and just one of all of those files happened to contain one of our systems from the 70s small talk is in the form of a software internet of software computers
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that is completely self-contained there's no separate operating system applications Etc only software computers communicating with each other and each simulating some
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aspect of the personal computer system some objects simulate characters on the screen some simulate pictures some windows some places where the users can do things the software computers are in terms of virtual Hardware that is
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independent of the physical computers they run on to bring this back to l we emulated the virtual Hardware in JavaScript actually it is faster than the actual Park computers of 40 years
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ago and with this we have a time machine that allows us to go back back back into the past and run the same software that both Bonnie and Steve Jobs saw and in fact I've been using this
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system to give this talk here we see something that is Vaguely Familiar overlapping Windows iconic representations and so forth and this uh system ran on the three main
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machines at zerox Park the alto uh the first modern style of personal computer the notaker the first portable computer and the more powerful Dorado
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computer Windows here are views of tools and the kinds of resources that media authors use to create the writings of the future they are not apps we can bring any and all objects uh in small
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talk system to any of these projects and we see here a view of the system itself an animation a half tone painting I did 40 years
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ago I can scribble it up a little bit for you here's some text the system also had ajust your recognizer we can use this a little bit later for something I think you'll like
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but here I can use it as a way to reorganize this view of text now let's go to the place I used to organize this talk here each of the small windows are links to places where people can do
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projects that stretch over time you can think of this system as having unlimited desktops uh each persists and they are media themselves anything can be done in each of them and
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they can be linked together in any way they are not hir archical I'm using some of these for this presentation and we can see where we've been and now I'm going to enter the next
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one which is a typical media screen for trying to describe something in this case Park research this work was just part of the elephant of personal Computing which is
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as in the Fable of the blind philosophers was being interpreted in different ways by by different researchers the arpa ipto information processing techniques office Community had no cental religion
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and funded people not projects so there were lots of different views Park was a microcosm of this community starting in the 70s and also very vit here are just
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four of a number of emphases I say it this way because individual researchers were often part of more than one research area today we are looking at work done by the Learning research group of which I was a
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part another major group was part of the computer systems lab which did much of the hardware heavy lifting and day-to-day tools one group that is less well known was the polos Group which is made from
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some of the angle Guardians that came over to park in the early 70s and they did a dab dazzling subset of NS among other things the basic idea of arpa was to avoid the disputes over different
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point points of view that were part of the blind philosophers Fable and try to do what scientists have done with figuring out a universe that we can only approach peace meal one of the triumphs of a few hundred years ago was to be
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able to make Globes of the earth as if it would look if we were out in space 200 years later the views in the 1980s were quite identical to the Globes of 1780 there were hardly any
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surprises another myth about Park was its extreme originality in fact it is almost more accurate to claim that we were less original in the 70s than we had been in the 60s when
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many of the ideas were explored for the first time there was an enormous wealth of ways to think about personal Computing and networks including sketchpad in the early 60s the very image of personal Computing engelbart of
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course Nelson and vanam that's you and Andy Ted the gril gesture recognition system on a tablet that was invented the same year as the mouse 1964 and this is where the conventions
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of making arrows Windows moving and resizing them came from Seymour paper in the logo turtle simula and some of our own stuff as well such as the arpanet
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the flex machine with its own first object-oriented operating system the idea of the dynamic and much much more and there was the whole earth catalog and its folks nearby Meno Park who are
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thinking big thoughts about universal access to tools not just physical but especially mental this was the first book in the Park library and it had a big influence on part of how we thought
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things should be we led the idea of lots of different tools being available with explanations and comments and could see that it would be just wonderful if such media could be brought to life as one found and made it this led to ideas
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about the next level of how to explain and explore but by actually making things from computer stuff in the kind of General literacy we have for reading and writing but now including the reading and writing of dyn dynamic
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models this kind of literacy is best learned by children and so we started to work with them here's the computer version of an article that 13-year-old Marian goldine wrote in Creative Computing magazine in
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1975 about what she'd done the previous year at in our group the computer version goes beyond reading to allow the reader to try out the very things that Marian is talking
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about we call this form an active essay right in the essay is a simulation of an alto screen so one can see what things look like when she did her projects and doing the very things that she did she
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started off by making a box object called Joe that can be sent messages to get it to behave programming and small talk is a bit more like training intelligent agents than like the more standard metaphor of programming as
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being like a cook making something from inert ingredients and now here's a wrinkle on a demo we used to do which combined animation and painting tools the animation tool is animating the bouncing
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ball and we can see that it's a bit weak we would expect that the ball would deform when it hits the ground we should draw a better cell for this Frame now the animation effect depends on what the brain does when it sees two
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different images one right after the other animators like to say that animation takes place in between the frames this means that we'd really like to do the redrawing of the bottom frame while the animation is running but these
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are different tools if they were apps in a conversion commercial version of personal Computing we most likely expect that they don't talk to each other and it would be difficult to get them to talk to each
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other this is a pet peeve of teds but here they are just object and any object can talk to any object first let's take a look at the menu for the animation window we can
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stop at ticking we can single step to the frame we care about now we want to share this frame with a painting tool if this was prepared ahead of time we would already be done but that would lose the
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point of this demo instead to paraphrase thorough we need to find out what Texas might have to say to Massachusetts that is how do each of the tools characterize their part and behaviors then we can do what Ted loves
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is to draw a line between the two windows some of the actions could already be predefined but here we want to Define one so we do this gesture to create a dynamic link between the two
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windows and what we want to say here is that the painter's picture wants to be linked to uh The Bouncing uh Windows current frame so
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we'll just write that in there and do it now we can start the animation again and start painting the deformed ball and it starts to look pretty good of course there's a lot more to
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show but this is plenty enough for today we had a terrific time bringing back this old system to life over the last few months as mentioned here all of the demos and forms were derived from old
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examples shown and published in the 70s and made without changing small Talk's Graphics system the beautiful dithered pictures use the Floyd Steinberg technique which is partially worked out by them at Stanford and park at the same
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time our system was built but we hardly use pictures like these or many bitmat paintings because there simply wasn't enough storage to hold them so it's nice to take advantage of the larger storage
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capacities today an iPhone for example is many tens of thousands of times larger and faster than the park machines the ancient proverb is in the country of the blind the oneeyed man is
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King Robert Heinen's version is in the country of the blind the oneeyed man is in for a hell of a rough time my version combines these into a prettyy good model for understanding much of human history in the country of blind
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the oneeyed people run things and the two-eyed people are in for the hell of a rough time but we owe much of civilization to the insights and suffering of the tiny number of two-eyed people Ted Nelson is one of those rare
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two-eyed people and we owe much to him and this is being celebrated today my view of how this works is that the two-eyed people come up with a glorious Symphony of how life will be so
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much deeper and richer if we just did X and the regular World acts as a low pass filter on the ideas in the end we are lucky to get a dial tone the blind won't see it and the
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oneeyed people will only catch a glimpse but they think their Glimpse is the whole thing and in our day and age if they think money can be made from the Glimpse something will happen they want to sell to the max Mass
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Market of the blond so they will water the Glimpse down much farther they could be Educators and help the blind learned how to see this is what science has done for the entire human race but learning to see is a
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chore and so most are not interested especially marketing people this is too bad especially when we consider the efforts the two-eyed people have to go through to even have a glimpse happen one of the keys is for the
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two-eyed people to turn into evangelists both Ted and our mutual hero Doug angelart were tired less over their lifetimes in pointing out that in this dial tone world the emperor not only has no clothes but his cell phone can't
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transmit real music do this to mix the metaphor another key is to make a working system of the future this was arpa's and especially Park's main mission make something that works not
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just for a demo but for a group of people some of what I showed is what Steve Jobs saw and the Macintosh was result of his Glimpse and interpretations by him and others at
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Apple of that Glimpse it wasn't a dial tone but it missed a number of really important ideas just as many of Ted's and Doug's ideas have been missed so with all this why bother
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bother having visions standard schooling is already trying to convert two-eyed children into standard children that is blind children why not just put more effort into this and save all the bother
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to me The Visionaries are the most important people we have because it is only by comparing their ideas with our normals that we can gauge how we are doing otherwise as it is for most people
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normal becomes their reality and they only measure from it toss Ted back into this mix and you've upset the apple cart and that's what we need this allows us to see that
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normal is only one of many possible Construction s and some of them could have been a much better and that the normals in the future could be much better and very different from what is considered reality
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today let's be very thankful that we live in a time and a place where two-eyed people are not burnt at stake or worse uh they were really supported in
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the in the 60s and they're tolerated at least today and let us also be thankful that we have a two-eyed person like tell Ted Nelson who
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has been tirelessly energetic about not just having ideas but going out and telling people about them not letting them die not letting
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them get absorbed into the low pass filter so thanks Ted so much and a personal thanks from Bonnie and me for being responsible for our marriage and
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beautiful life together thanks bye-bye
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