hypertext

Interests Meme

questioned these seven interests, if you want me to ask about yours, comment below. 4ad A rather good independent record label. The people who brought the world The Pixies, Dead Can Dance, The Cocteau Twins, M/A/R/R/S, and so on. ansible Dave Langford’s multi-Hugo-winning fanzine/semi-prozine. Also an anagram of ‘lesbian’. looney labs A small games company with a reputation for quirky games: Fluxx, Chrononauts, Icehouse. magic realism I’m rather fond of the works of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Jorge Luis Borges. plokta Another Hugo-winning fanzine. salt and sauce The only thing worth putting on chips. I sneer at your gravy. xanadu… Read More »Interests Meme

Making links

Some years ago, back when I was in sixth form and trying to decide what I wanted to study at University, the BBC broadcast a Horizon documentary on novel interfaces for computers, which was presented by Douglas Adams and Tom Baker. The documentary presented a future information system in which you could follow links between documents, images and videos, with software “agents” that helped you find things. More than anything else, it was a novel documentary by itself; how better to show what a new information system might be like, than to film the documentary as if it were being… Read More »Making links

The mother of all demos

This isn’t exactly news, but it may interest some of you. First, a bit of computer history. In 1968, Doug Englebart gave a ninety-minute demonstration of NLS at the Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco. NLS, the oNLine System, had been under development by the Augmentation Research Center at Stanford since 1962, and had a number of features which we now consider commonplace: the mouse, outline lists, hypertext links, and so on. The demo was filmed at the time, and there have been copies and fragments of varying quality floating around ever since. Some enterprising soul has now uploaded… Read More »The mother of all demos