Geeks bearing gifts

What Hacker News says

1. uxp100May 2021
   No, but also not just someone, Ted Nelson. I highly recommend Geeks Bearing Gifts or Computer Lib/Dream Machines. He is a crank, who has never been involved in a successful software project as far as I am aware. He is also great.
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2. sideb0ardJan 2020
   All good recs so far. Here's a few I haven't seen mentioned yet -

   Computing in the Middle Ages: A View From the Trenches 1955-1983 - Severo Ornstein

   Early British Computers - Simon Lavington

   Geeks Bearing Gifts - Ted Nelson (and also Computer Lib/Dream Machines)

   more recently - UNIX: A History and a Memoir by Brian Kernighan

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3. leocFeb 2019
   His Geeks Bearing Gifts is a more detailed, written treatment of the same material: http://www.lulu.com/shop/ted-nelson/geeks-bearing-gifts/pape... . It's also a more affordable alternative to Computer Lib/Dream Machines if you want to send him some money.
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4. GuiAJun 2014
   To the confused HNers:

   Xanadu is a project by Ted Nelson.

   Ted Nelson is a fundamental figure of early computing (despite not being a computer scientist himself). His work (recommended: Dream Machines/Computer Lib, 1974; Literary Machines, 1981; Geeks Bearing Gifts, 2008) is about how computers touch us as humans, and how they affect our future, especially when it comes to communicating and using them to spread+build knowledge and ideas. When Nelson wrote his first essays, very few people had the insight or knowledge to really understand what he was going on about. Nelson came from a movie acting/storywriting/literary background, and this allowed him to establish parallels and formulate ideas that no one at the time could have done. I would argue that even today, some of his finer points still hold deep relevance and are yet unknown from the general computing crowd.

   Ted Nelson remains a fairly unknown figure in computing, partly because he never wrote much code/developed products/worked in traditional research groups himself (a major misstep in a field where you tend to be mostly recognized for the projects you ship or papers you publish), and because a lot of his ideas were replaced by ideas that are much more simple to implement and make viable. A lot of hackers do like to ridicule him for those reasons, which I think is a mistake - despite those shortcomings, his body of work is still full of ideas and theories that you won't find anywhere else. You can almost see a second, parallel path that computing could have taken in the 70s. (Nelson was respected by many more famous computer scientists, including for example Alan Kay)

   That's where Xanadu comes in: Xanadu is an implementation for Nelson's vision for hypertext (which predates the hypertext we know by more than a decade or so). His hypertext is much deeper than Berners-Lee's: notably, it is based on 2-way links (so not only can a page link to other pages, but you can also see which pages link to that page), a deep version system (so that you can access past versions of webpages), stronger "linking" (no such thing as "broken links" in Xanadu), etc. Of course one can see why this is much harder to implement at scale than the web we have now. Nonetheless, Nelson has been working on it through the years, as evidenced by this release.

   PS: if you do start searching the web for material about Ted Nelson, do not start with the Wired article about him from a decade or so ago. It is terrible. I quite like his YouTube videos, but they require to be familiar with his work (or at least his rhetoric style) already. I think "Geeks Bearing Gifts" is the best foray into Nelson's style - and it is short enough that one can read it quickly. Then, if you want to really get into the meat of his stuff, dive into his other books.

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5. leocJan 2014
   It's Ted Nelson rattling through some of his computer-history notes on camera. So it's good material, but it's much better presented in his enjoyable and reasonably-priced book /Geeks Bearing Gifts/ http://www.lulu.com/shop/ted-nelson/geeks-bearing-gifts/pape... .

   I noted a couple of apparent mistakes: at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c6SUOeAqOjU#t=4m26s Nelson says that Xerox paid Jobs to look at the PARC work, while AFAIK Apple in fact paid Xerox, in pre-IPO Apple stock. He also suggested that Xerox tried to bring in Jobs, when it seems to have been Apple who made the approach (at the instigation of Jef Raskin at Apple). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c6SUOeAqOjU#t=2m15s is misleading. PARC was more-or-less forbidden to buy a DEC PDP-10, which would have reflected badly on the competing machines from Xerox's new acquisition Scientific Data Systems, so PARC built a PDP-10 clone (the MAXC) in-house for their own use. That had very little to do with why they later designed and built the Altos: there was nothing remotely similar to an Alto out there that they could have bought (Nelson knows this).

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6. sideb0ardDec 2013
   Howard Rheingold's 'Tools for Thought: The History and Future of Mind-Expanding Technology' - covers George Boole, Charles Babbage, Alan Turing, John Von Neumann

   Jon Gernter's 'The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation' - very cool story about the formation of Bell Labs and covers the Transistor, Satellite comms, the laser, and a ton of other stuff up till, but not disappointingly not including Unix.

   John Markoff's 'What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry' - what is says!

   Ted Nelson's 'Geeks Bearing Gifts' (or any of his YouTube Computers For Cynics videos) - awesome, curmudgeonly alternative (but accurate) version of computer history.

   Michael A. Hiltzik's 'Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age' - as someone else mentioned, really great history

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