Alan Kay's tribute to Ted Nelson at "Intertwingled" Fest (2014)

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 could fly back here Wednesday

night but I can't do it so we made

this video to celebrate

your day and

Bonnie and 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 Bonnie made a little video explaining this

and here she is hi I'm Bonnie

McMurray and this is how Ted Nelson spawned the

movie Tron and a marriage that's lasted more than 30

years the year was 1979

I just left Universal Studios to write a movie about

a videogame warrior inside of a computer there

were no personal computers at that time only these

in LA there were many video arcades but

one computer stores for home-brewed types only I

went there and found this book

Nelson I read it cover to cover well covered

a middle and then upside down and other cover to

middle and there was an article about Alan Kay so

I went up to Xerox PARC and met the guy a half

hour interview stretched in two hours and

Alan Kay became the technical consultant

on the movie Tron we spent many happy hours in

conversation along Venice and Santa Monica beaches and

also do cars and I wrote a script

filled with cool science there was a bit who

to be a program and there was a video game warrior along

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 sure on

the first movie script ever to be edited for the word processing

program it's sold to Disney and after eight new writers

and considerable meddling it became the movie Tron

groundbreaking yes but Alan I think the marriage turned up

into the movie we thank you Ted Nelson

thanks bond

as thornton wilder's old fortune teller says

it is easy to tell the future but asks

who can tell the past it's not

just a memory problem but one of too much complicated detail without

enough perspectives it would be great if we could go

a look at the world Bonnie talks about and to

some extent we can some years

Xerox 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 rescued and a few thousand files were

recovered and just one of all of those files

happen to contain one of our systems from the 70s

small talk is in the form of a software

internet of software computers that is completely self-contained

there's no separate operating system

applications etc only software computers

communicating with each other and each simulating

some 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

terms of virtual hardware that is independent of

the physical computers they run on to bring

this back to life we emulated the virtual hardware in

JavaScript actually it is faster

than the actual park computers of 40 years 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 in fact I've

been using the system to give this talk here

we see something that is vaguely familiar overlapping

windows iconic representations

and so forth and this

system ran on the

three main machines at Xerox PARC the alto

the first modern

style of personal computer the

note-taker the first portable computer and the

more powerful Dorado computer windows

here our views of tools and the kinds

authors use to create the

writings of the future they're not apps

we can bring any and all objects in

small talk system to any of these

projects and we see

here a view of the system itself and

animation a halftone painting I

did 40 years ago I can

scribble it up a little bit for you

here's some text the system also

had a gesture recognizer we

little bit later for something I think you'll like but

here I can use it as a way to reorganize

this view of text now let's go

to the place I use to organize this talk

here each of the small windows are links

to places where people can do projects that stretch

over time you can think of this system

is having unlimited desktops each

persists and they are media themselves

anything can be done in each of them

and they can be linked together in any way they

are not hierarchical 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 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 as in the

blind philosophers was being interpreted in different

ways by different researchers the

ARPA eye PTO information

processing techniques office community have no central

religion in funded people not projects so

there are lots of different views Park

was a microcosm of this community starting

in the 70s and also very very here

are just four of a number of emphases I

this way because individual researchers

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 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

Pollos group which was made from some of the Anchor

Bar Dean's that came over to park in the early

70s and they did a dazzling subset

of NLS among other things the

basic idea of ARPA was to avoid the disputes over

different 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

piecemeal one of the triumphs of a few

hundred years ago was to be able to make globes of the earth as if

it would look if we were out in space two

hundred years later the views in the 1980s were

quite identical to the globes of 1780

there were hardly any 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 seventies than we had been in the 60s when 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 course Nelson and Van Damme

that's you and Andy Ted the grail

gesture recognition system on a tablet

hat was invented the same year as the mouse 1964

and this is where are the conventions of making

arrows windows moving and resizing them

came from Seymour Papert in the logo

turtle Simula and some

of our own stuff as well such as the ARPANET 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 Menlo

who are 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 things should be we love

the idea of lots of different tools being available with

explanations and comments and could see that would be just

wonderful if such media could be brought to life as one found

and made it this led to ideas

about the next level of how to explain and explore 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

dynamic models this

best learned by children and so we started

to work with them here's the computer version of

year-old Marion Goldeen

wrote in creative computing magazine in 1975

about what she'd done the previous year in

our group the computer

version goes beyond reading to allow the reader to

try out the very things that Marion is talking 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 started off by making a

box object called Jo that can be sent

messages to get it to behave programming

and small talk is a bit more like training intelligent agents

then like the more standard metaphor of programming

as being like a cook making something from inert ingredients and

now here's a wrinkle

a demo we used to do which combine animation and painting

tools the animation tool is animating

the bouncing 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 different images

one right after the other animators like

to say the animation takes place in between the frames

this means that we'd really like to do

redrawing of the bottom frame while the animation is running but

these are different tools if they

were apps in a conversion commercial version

of personal computing we most likely expect

hat they don't talk to each other and it would be difficult

to get them to talk to each other this is a pet peeve

of Ted's but here they are just objects

and any object can talk to any object

first let's take a look at the menu for

the animation window we can stop it

icking 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 point of this demo

instead to paraphrase the row we need to

find out what Texas might have to say to Massachusetts that

is how do each of the tools characterize their

parts and behaviors then we can do what ted

loves 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

windows and what we

want to say here is that the

painters picture wants

to be linked to the bouncing

Windows current frame so we'll just write that

in there and do it now we can start the animation

again and start painting the deformed ball

you

and it starts to look

pretty good of course

the 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 examples shown and published in the 70s

and made without changing smolitics 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 time our

system was built but we hardly use pictures

like these or many bitmap paintings

because there simply wasn't enough storage to hold them

so it's nice to take advantage of the larger storage

capacities today an iPhone for

many tens of thousands of times larger and faster

than the park machines

the ancient proverb is in the country of the blind the

one-eyed man is king Robert Heinlein's

version is in the country of the blind the

one-eyed man is in for a hell of a rough time my

version combines these into a pretty good model for

understanding much of human history in the country

of blind the one-eyed people run things and

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 to eye 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 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

one eyed people only catch a glimpse but

hey 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 market of the blind

so they will water the glimpse down much farther

it 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 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

the two eyed people to turn into evangelist both

Ted and Our Mutual hero Doug Engelbart were tireless

over their lifetimes in pointing out that in

this dial-tone world the Emperor not only

no clothes but his cellphone can't transmit real music

is this to mix the metaphor

another key is to make a working sister

this is our person especially parks

main mission make something that works not

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 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 bodger bother having visions

standard schooling is already trying to convert

to AI children into standard children that is

blind children why

not just put more effort into this and save all the bother

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 normal becomes

their reality and they only measure from it

toss Ted back

into this mix and you've upset the applecart

and that's what we need this allows us to

see that normal is only one of many possible constructions

and some of them could have been a much better and

as the normals in the future could be much better and very

different from what is considered reality today

let's be very thankful that

we live in a time in a place where two eye people

are not burnt

at the stake or worse they

were really supported in in the 60s and

you're tolerated at least today and

let us also be thankful

that we have a two eyed person like tell

Ted Nelson who has

been tirelessly energetic

about not just having

ideas but going out and telling people about them

not letting them die not letting

them get absorbed into the low-pass filter

so thanks to it so much personal

thanks from body and me for

being responsible for our marriage and

beautiful life together Thanks bye bye