TheTedNelson
1 HN recommender · recommended in 3 months, 2014–2023
14:02 · 23K views · May 28, 2012
Ted Nelson, in his Computers for Cynics series, gives a critical history of Xerox PARC's vision of personal computing. He lists what he sees as the limitations and wrong turns in PARC's approach to the desktop and documents.
HN readers treat it as a contrarian counterpoint to the usual PARC mythology, though one commenter noted a few apparent mistakes in it.
3 comments from Hacker News
Thank you. Nelson does a great job enumerating the limitations of PARC's vision and the capabilities absent from PARC's work. After being exposed to PARC's self-congratulatory self-promotion for decades, Nelson's history is a breath of fresh air. This is not to devalue what PARC accomplished, but that its accomplishments must be taken in perspective. It All Went Wrong at Xerox PARC is also on YouTube: this video
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/ [LINK] . I noted a couple of apparent mistakes: at this video 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). this video 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).
This comment jogged my memory of a Ted Nelson video subtitled 'It all went wrong at Xerox PARC' : this video