Transcription of Nelson HT03
...my brain serving correctly, our next speaker is Ted Nelson
Ladies and gentlemen,
I'm very honoured to appear here.
??? the time I'm on the light.
I'm very honoured to appear,
to have a chance to talk to this
distinguished group of investment bankers,
and I know how you must feel
after the dot.com crash.
The ones who made,
who made out well
are not here today
and of course,
the ones who lost everything
aren't either.
So you would be a group of the astute,
the far seing
who are able to understand
the concepts
I want to put before you.
A lot of talk,
there was a lot of tall talk,
in the late 90's
as the world's got bigger and bigger.
You heard (of?) all these wonderful tools
that were gonna help people
understand computers.
So we had talking paperclips.
For those to whom
the world wide web was too complicated
we had the Bonzi Buddy,
a gorilla,
a purple gorilla who would help you through
and stay on your browser.
And we have
the wonderful website askjeeves.com
which got I believe ten million
in first stage capital.
Jeeves says
as you got on the front page,
"ask me anything I know everything",
said "what is the population of Bulgaria ?".
"I know this about Bulgaria:
Bulgaria is a country".
And then a little list
distracts you from the fact
that it paid no attention to your question.
So we are seing,
we have seen
simultanously the dumb down of concepts
being offered to consumers,
and the escalation of idiocy
in the concepts being presented
to the likes of you.
So let's cut through this.
We have a computer world now
which has become a nightmare honky-tonk prison,
where fanfares and,
and pretty flashing lights
distract you from the fact
that everything is progressively
more complicated,
and you're being spied on on every site,
and nothing is available anymore,
and you have to sign up for everything.
I say : let's start over,
let's start over,
let's clean the slate.
Are you users of Windows ?
How are you doing on your backups ?
Have you had the machine halt
in the middle of backups by any chance ?
Have you lost any data ?
Have things disappeared
into strange parts
of your disk ?
And have you, have you had
to reinstall the operating system
and loose track of all your settings ?
Or are you a user of the Macintosh ?
Once so simple and unreliable.
Now rock solid and uncomprehensible !
So the beginning user
puts something on the desktop,
"ok, now I file it inside, op",
and gets the full unix directory.
Right
How about Linux?
Oh that's great!
We have this wonderful command line interface
or we have the,
the gnome thing
with really nice
incomprehensible widgets
that were designed as a
dumbdown of the command line interface
as distinct from.
...clarity
Everything is designed
either for people who
need to know too much,
or
for an imaginary stupid person.
So many people want design for
"the man in the street",
well, the man in the street
is lying on his back
with the bottle of a
weld?? Irish broom.
We need to design
for the intelligent
but clueless beginner;
and shall we say
"the power beginner".
We want to create a new computer world,
where
things are no harder
than they need to be,
and that's so difficult,
because the issue was never
electronics,
and was never
the inners of
complex operating systems,
the issue was always
(how much have I got)
You got two minutes
the issue was always
the design
of imaginary constructs.
You see,
science is supposed to be
about universals,
and yet computer science, I believe,
has become sidetracked
into the ramifications of tradition,
because
it's all about
computer languages
which are written
as long strings.
So,
you write a program as a long string,
and then you do string matching against the various variables
and the opcodes and so on,
and then that thing compiles
an executable.
So people go all off
into the
the consequences
of string parsing and syntax,
but the real issue is the complex executable,
making it understandable,
because computer languages
are about
the human mind's grasp
for the task to be done,
and maintaining it
through iterations
as you improve the program.
Ok, so the design,
so computer science has always been I believe
about
the design of imaginary constructs
and their ramifications.
But everybody thinks it's about reality,
and that's the mistake.
It's much more
like game design.
So the
game I am presenting to you,
the package let us say,
the zigzag virtual machine,
virtual interactive machine,
would be a cross platform
new user system.
The power beginner
can look at all the cells
and orthogonal connections,
the
relaxed beginner
can merely use the functions
"add relative",
"add appointment",
"deliver appointment",
"share appointment"
and making these,
and adding these
within the language of the system
so there's a unified package
you do not have to walk outside,
and it would be the same
running under linux,
and running under the macintosh,
and running
under windows,
by eschewing
the temptations
of each of these environments
and rather
creating a hermetically clean
internal world
we can start over.
So I offer to you
a simple new beginning,
a fresh start,
a sunny morning
after the hangover
nightmare
we have built today. utterance