Ted came to speak at St Paul's last Tuesday. He was on great form. Just turned 70, he spoke with few notes and to the theme of his book-in-progress, Geeks Bearing Gifts — a look at how technology advances not by deep intent and precise planning but through accident and politics ('the clash and resolution of agendas'): nineteenth century rail track development (Brunel's broad gauge vs standard gauge), space travel (the science was developed by the Russian Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, but Goddard gets the credit), the invention of radio — Tesla ('the man who invented the twentieth century') vs Marconi, the American space programme (V-2 rockets, von Braun — Operation Paperclip — and the course of NASA's development) …
Including von Braun allowed Ted to mention the 1960 film about his work, I Aim at the Stars — subtitled by wits, 'But Sometimes I Hit London'. This was a talk peppered with good jokes. (Photos left and right by Frode Hegland.)
Then on to computing technology, software and hardware, and the erratic, kludgy nature of its development. The highly partisan Apple/Microsoft war-of-loyalty is wholly beside the point when the angle of approach is the one Ted takes, but he still had a great line on Windows: you can tell that it was designed from the ground up 'because there's a lot of … ground still up there'. In a Nelson world, the clipboard of either OS would have been fundamentally overhauled and made useful, not reduced to a feeble echo of the real-life clipboard on which it was modelled.
I hope Geeks Bearing Gifts sees the light to day: listening to Ted talk about the history of computing you appreciate how deeply he has lived and known its history over the last 45+ years. He understands Doug Engelbart's vision from the inside (the mouse was a detail — 'the work of a weekend', so to speak) and he had so much to communicate in the hour he had with us he only had 15 minutes in which to demo Xanadu (beginning with the Cosmic Book) and ZigZag.
Lunch came and discussion went on. Several of our students followed up next day, emailing Ted to maintain the link he'd established so well with them. Ted and Marlene (Mallicoat) made great guests.
Ted left us with working versions of both Xanadu and ZigZag. The latter can be downloaded from here and Xanadu is now available here. There's an excellent video available of Adam Moore (Nottingham University), working with ZigZag and biological and chemical data:
Further ZigZag resources are available online here.
All in all, we had a really good few hours together. What's more, a chance discovery by Ted of some mint first editions of Computer Lib meant we could buy a copy for departmental use (student and staff), as well as one for our main reference library. It was published in 1974 and you only have to dip into it to see it was way ahead of its time.
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