Picture 1. "The 1972 mockup: connections between contents of windows"
Sami Määttä
26th of August 2002
Reading about Ted Nelson's thoughts (on objectives of Xanadu) suggests that "side by side visualization and use (parallel hypertext)" is of crucial importance in striving for a better hypertext and tools for it (see my notes on this).
Nelson writes: "From the begining, we designed in the Xanadu design for one fundamental visualization. This visualization would allow annotation (in a parallel window), intercomparison (in a parallel window), link following (in a parallel window), and many other functions".
The picture 1 (dating back to 1972) "propose, and illustrate, a generalized method for showing connections and correspondences on a computer screen" (-Nelson).
Picture 1. "The 1972 mockup: connections between
contents of windows"
The picture is explained by Nelson: "The first picture shows a user sitting at a mockup of a windowing system where content within one window actually connects to content within another window (...) it is not just an interface, since mechanisms are required to implement this structure. I believe such an interface and structure offer far higher capability than the windowing systems we have today (which I believe were designed later)".
The CosmicBook software by Nelson et al. gives one a first demo of what is developing to a hypertext reading/editing tool.
Picture 2. "A CosmicBook Flight is a set of pages with visible
connections."
The latest news is about Abora. This is a prototype implementation of a hypertext system inspired by Ted Nelsons Xanadu and in particular the Udanax-Gold implementation by XOC. See http://www.night.dircon.co.uk/abora/index.html