New frontiers exploration needs a group of people doing heavy knowledge work with a new technology that enables it. Doug Engelbart, https://youtu.be/LpIYdyOXqkk?t=2789

“We also see this in the million startups that have reinvented the spreadsheet except constrained it to perform a particular set of things and realize: no, really, people use spreadsheets because they are unconstrained”. https://youtu.be/07j2AXC9BH8?si=aekq9ikZ-xjlaeS-&t=1037

Our Collective IQ is boosted by concurrently developing, integrating and applying knowledge. Doug Engelbart, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LpIYdyOXqkk&t=880s

Now that we have all these wonderful devices, it should be the goal of society to put them in the service of truth and learning. And this is the way I propose. Not through obscure forms of "information retrieval;" not through newly oppressive forms of "computer-assisted instruction;" and not through a purported science of "artificial intelligence“ that will create new personalisms to irk us. All these obstructive oddities, I think, have developed as separate ideals because of the grand preposterosity of Professionalism that has created a world-wide cult of mutual incomprehensibility and disconnected special goals. Now we need to get everybody together again. We want to go back to the roots of our civilization - the ability, which we once had, for everybody who could read to be able to read everything. We must once again become a community of common access to a shared heritage. This was of course what Vannevar Bush said in 1945 in an article everybody cites but nobody reads. Ted Nelson, Computer Lib/Dream Machines, Hypertext

This all has a certain vagueness if you do not understand how bound you are today by paper— the problems of finding it , sorting it, looking things up. (If you write, that is, write a lot, you know all too well how intractable is paper, what a damned nuisance.) With a system like Engelbart's, now, whatever is written is instantly there. Whatever you want to look up Is instantly there, simultaneously interconnected to everything else l t should be connected to - source materials, footnotes, comments and so on. A document is completed the moment it is written: no human being has to retype i t . (It need not be typed on paper at all ,if it’s just for the workshop members: a printout is only needed if it has to go to someone outside the system). In many ways, Engelbart's system is a prototype for the world of the future, I hope. ALL HANDLING OF PAPER IS ELIMINATED. Whatever you write, you write on the screens with keyboard and pointer. (No more backs of envelopes, yellow pads, file cards, typewriters.) Whatever you transmit to fellow users of the system you simply 'release' - no physical paper changes hands. The group has also worked out some remarkable techniques for collaborative endeavor. Two people - say, one in California and one in New York - can work together through their screens, plus a phone link; it's as if they were side-by-side at a magic table. Each sees on his screen what the other sees; each controls a moving dot (or "cursor") that shows where he's pointing. The effect is somewhere between a blackboard and a desk; both may call up documents, point things out in them, change them, and anything else two people might do when working on something together. Basically the system Is a large-scale setup for the storage, bringing forth, viewing and revision of documents and connections among them. Ted Nelson, Computer Lib/Dream Machines, Doug Engelbart and “The Augmentation of Intellect”

Back in the days of WYSIWYG web editors like Dreamweaver and Microsoft FrontPage you would often end up with this problem, where you try to do any edit in the WYSIWYG side and then you look at the generated HTML and is ridiculous: There's like 16 nested, empty span tags and no one would ever be able to maintain that. And my worry is basically that when you automatically create markup for something that has a very complex graphical representation, it's really like one way: maybe it will help you produce a compiled output, but it doesn't actually help you go back in edit and tweak the representation later. I think we really need to get to some kind of good intermediate representation that allows you to flexibly go both ways. Slim Lim, Metamuse Episode 48 Rich Text with Slim Lim, 47:35, https://open.spotify.com/episode/51u2e3Ak6E4yMfqmA0NOdm?si=c8WSrsIUTvqlq4tfmT1CRA

[Slim] And that goes back to something that Adam and I were chatting about earlier, which is that a lot of people gripe and complain, that LaTex is the best we have, and, you know, I'm one of them. But it really is the case that LaTex was this monumental effort by really a few people, and amount of effort that would be considered really impressive if I were to try to do the same thing but better today. Not a lot of people have spare time to do this all-in-one text formatting and packaging document representation project even though it would have a huge impact on the way people write and publish these kinds of documents. And so, in many ways, we're sort of just bottlenecked on the fact that it's hard to do incremental improvements to this particular area. We really depend on these software monoliths to keep us afloat. […] [Wiggins] And yeah, I agree. It's a monumental effort, but I mean mathematics is so important and foundational and so much of human endeavor that certainly seems like one worth investing in, although perhaps hard to reap a profit from and that makes it harder to put concentrated capital behind it. Slim Lim & Wiggins, Metamuse Episode 48 Rich Text with Slim Lim, 48:30, https://open.spotify.com/episode/51u2e3Ak6E4yMfqmA0NOdm?si=BHebRCxjQVSETJlrxi1McQ

[McGranaghan]: Isn’t the state of the art [for rendering equations in the browser] generating PNG and sticking it in the web page? [Slim]: Not exactly but almost. So MathML, which is an XML dialect or mathematical markup language was this effort to build XML style syntax for typesetting mathematics naturally. It is only implemented in Firefox, so that's really unfortunate. So in terms of the state of the art, there are basically two libraries that you can use to typeset mathematics: there's MathJax and KaTex. MathJax supports all valid LaTex […]. The problem is that MathJax is very slow. So if you ever go on MathOverflow or another related StackExchange and you see all of these answers with weird gaps, and then as you watch before you the page starting to load all of the rendered equations bumping everything down one level at a time, that's MathJax in action. And oftentimes it is doing what you're describing where it is outputting an SVG or a PNG or something like that. And it's reflowing the page with every equation. Then you have KaTex, which was a library developed at Khan Academy where they realize that MathJax’s performance was not satisfactory for their exercises. KaTex supports a much more limited subset of all of LaTex syntax, but it does it all using CSS and it doesn't reflow the page for every equation, it’s basically instant rendering. And basically, it means that your options if you want to render math are: - Only target Firefox - Use a limited subset of math that’s supported by KaTex - Constrain yourself to extremely slow, dozens-of-reflow, full-expressive-power rendering to inline PNGs. And that's just not a great situation to be in and we haven't even gotten to the question of how people write math. So I would say that people underestimate how open this problem space is. Just take a moment of silence to like recognize the gravity of the situation. Slim Lim, Metamuse Episode 48 Rich Text with Slim Lim, 52:05, https://open.spotify.com/episode/51u2e3Ak6E4yMfqmA0NOdm?si=kKrmc0JWRdey8N1s1OXC9A

I believe computer screens can make people happier, smarter, and better able to cope with the copious problems of tomorrow. But only if we do right, right now. WHY? The computer's capability for branching among events, controlling exterior devices, controlling outside events, and mediating in all other events, makes possible a new era of media. Until now, the mechanical properties of external objects determined what they were to us and how we used them. But henceforth this is arbitrary. The recognition of that arbitrariness, and re-consideration among broader and more general alternatives, awaits us. All the previous units and mechanisms of learning, scholarship, arts, transaction and confirmation, and even self-reminder, were based in various ways upon physical objects - the properties of paper, carbon paper, files, books and bookshelves. To read from paper you must move the physical object in front of you. Its contents cannot be made to slide, fold, shrink, become transparent, or get larger. But all this Is now changing, and suddenly. The computer display screen does all these things if desired, to the same markings we have previously handled on paper. The computer display screen is going to become universal very fast; this is guaranteed by the suddenly rising cost of paper. And we will use them for everything. [...] Our screen displays will be alive with animation in their separate segments of activity, and will respond to our actions as if alive physically too. Ted Nelson, Computer Lib/Dream Machines, Fantics

[Wiggins]: For me, thinking about that word longevity, I tend to think about what is long, I guess. What is a span of time that counts as long and of course it depends a lot on what you're talking about. So if you're talking about all of society, culture, humanity, then perhaps you’re talking in the thousands of years, hundreds or thousands of years. So for example, the long now is a phrase that we use to the local-first paper, we tend to use it internally on our team to refer to longer-term. Thinking this comes from the Long Now Foundation, and the long now clock project, which is sort of this idea to build a clock that can keep time for 10,000 years and it's basically an art project, but it's designed to inspire us to think longer term, and that can obviously connect to things about climate change or human culture. And since humans are naturally inclined to think probably pretty short term, actually really short term: We think about the day that's ahead or the week that's ahead of us, maybe at most the year that's ahead of us, we don't tend to think in tens or hundreds or thousands of years. That's maybe a society level thing. I think for individuals and thinking about, you know, software as it impacts our lives as individuals, I think a human lifespan is actually is a pretty good chunk of time to compare something to. Wiggins and McGranaghan, Metamuse Episode 49, Software Longevity, 05:06, https://open.spotify.com/episode/1DCNy94TBt3aoGbM8PNlRv?si=8Ny-UxkNStWnvjGA1EnO-A

[Wiggins]: Now, some have argued that perhaps part of the challenge here is the rapid pace of change of that underlying system of those APIs. I think it's interesting here to contrast the Apple versus Microsoft approach. So I think that Microsoft with DOS and later Windows was really focused on backwards compatibility quite in an impressive level. I'm not exactly sure when the cut-offs are, but I think you could run DOS stuff natively on windows till well into the Windows lineage, and much later versions of Windows could run much earlier versions. But that's part of, I think, what also created the relative instability and unreliability of that line of operating systems, which is when you need to support every conceivable thing that's ever existed in the past and put it all together in the same box, and things get messy pretty fast. Apple with the iOS world has gone very much the other route which is they basically are releasing new stuff, a new OS update, once a year and if app developers don't keep up-to-date you pretty quickly just fall out of the App Store. […] You have this very demanding operating system that requires developers be doing active maintenance, or else it [your app] tends to go away. [McGranaghan]: While I don't doubt that there was some contribution in the Windows situation to instability from needing to support all versions forever, I think what really gets you is when you need to do that, and things that are really end-user-facing, like visual in particular, because the strategies that you typically use for providing stability are not viable in that world. So, if you look at things like Unix-style server, operating systems, many programming languages, these are things that can have backwards compatibility for a long time, certainly decades. But the way they do that is they just never ever, ever ever break any APIs. And if you want to do something new, either too bad, or call it "thing 2” and just keep “thing 1” around forever. […] you can't really do that with a windowing system, for example, or a user interface paradigm or how things look on the screen, right? You just got to pick something and do it, and the old thing needs to go. And so I think it does become very hard to have that culture of very long-lived durability that you see in those systems-y programs. [Wiggins]: Yeah, maybe that points to the fundamental trade-off there, which is durability in many cases means stability, which means less change. But change is how we get things that are new and better and the world technology and computers in the internet is so at the very beginning, there's so much unexplored space, and it would be a shame if we just said, okay, well we've been working on making these computers here for a few decades now, this is pretty much how they are, probably it is probably good for the next several hundred years, let's just hold it there. That's not what we want to do. We want to keep changing and improving. So yeah, there just is a trade-off between those two. [McGranaghan]: Yeah, I think there's a very real tension and I agree want to keep exploring. I do think that in adopting this attitude of exploring and taking risks, we are going to find some things that in retrospect were not good choices. The intuition here is, I think we're projecting these very dynamic system benefits over lives that we have historically associated with durable goods. So we get the shiny new computer-enabled, software-enabled thing, and it works great the first year, and we think: things like this, before we had computers, they worked for 20 or 30 years, therefore, this thing is going to work for 20 or 30 years, it's gonna be awesome. And we've kind of projected that out for, and I think in many cases that's not going to be true. And so we are going to have to confront the downside of that tradeoff. [Wiggins]: And do you think the downside there is mainly economic? You buy the smart refrigerator seems great for the first year, some cloud service goes offline suddenly and your refrigerator doesn't work anymore and you got to throw it out and get a new one, or do you think there's something beyond the economic side? [McGranaghan]: Unfortunately I think there are several potential very serious downsides. Just to give you a couple, one that we're already seeing is this issue of repairability or even modifiability. Again, if you look at these durable goods categories like tractors, which is very prominent example right now, traditionally people could service and maintain and change and modify and improve their own tractors. But as tractors increasingly become like iPhones, you know, these black-box computers in many ways, or highly computerized hardware, Potentially you can’t service them yourself, you can't repair them yourself, you can't modify them yourself and that has all kinds of second order effects. There's also this whole thing about surveillance basically that I think we're sleeping on a little bit, but we do need to go down that rabbit hole today. [Wiggins]: On the economic side, I think there's all sort of the incentive which is basically Apple and other phone manufacturers have done very very well by always creating that shiny new thing that comes out every year or two. And you think: I want to upgrade. It’s even often built into cell phone contracts and things, people want to get a new phone very frequently. And I think that's paired with sometimes the operating system upgrades, or maybe the visual refreshes, it's almost more like fashion, the fashion industry found this very clever way to get around the fact their IP isn't really protectable, which is they just make new fashion trends the totally change for a couple of years. So then you like need to go out and get a new wardrobe. It's not the clothes wore out necessarily. It's that you want to be up-to-date and you look behind the times when you’re strolling around in your bell bottoms and those have been out of fashion for three years or whatever it is. And so I think there's an element of this kind of a fashion or desire to get the new thing that has driven a lot of revenue for these companies. I don't mean to imply that that some kind of a cackling in the back layer, they're using this opportunity to improve and genuinely make their products better: Each version of the iPhone has that better camera, that better battery life, the bigger brighter screen, it is genuinely better, but it's also the companies are very incentivized for a high pace of change that has you buying new products all the time, as opposed to something longer-term. Wiggins and McGranaghan, Metamuse Episode 49, Software Longevity, 18:33 , https://open.spotify.com/episode/1DCNy94TBt3aoGbM8PNlRv?si=euUyYhr6SWC4C0KFtLmMHQ

[Wiggins] […] one of the things that points to that to me feels like maybe the most fundamental is to just think about longevity in the first place and just care about it in the first place. Part of the reason I thought this topic would be an interesting one.I think, again, tech industry skews (?) young, I think also had the same gap in my thinking as a younger person, which was I just didn't have the longer experience to be able to see what it is like for software that I've created that's in production for three years, five years, ten years, and longer and what happens over time. It's a part of what I like with the SQLite long-term support page, they basically lead with a statement that our goal is to support this until the year 2050 and so, will they achieve that? hard to know… But just by making that statement, calling it out as a value for themselves and thinking about it actively, maybe this comes back to the long-now clock idea, which is, they may or may not succeed but certainly one good way to not succeed is to not think about it in the first place. And so this makes it a first-class concern. Wiggins & McGranaghan, Metamuse Episode 49, Software Longevity, 30:14, https://open.spotify.com/episode/1DCNy94TBt3aoGbM8PNlRv?si=UT2qfBJAQWWjr5QsUGkunw

In the fullness of time, the files you create are more important than the tools you use to create them. Apps are ephemeral, but your files have a chance to last. The ancient temples of Egypt contain hieroglyphs that were chiseled in stone thousands of years ago. The ideas hieroglyphs convey are more important than the type of chisel that was used to carve them. The world is filled with ideas from generations past, transmitted through many mediums, from clay tablets to manuscripts, paintings, sculptures, and tapestries. These artifacts are objects that you can touch, hold, own, store, preserve, and look at. To read something written on paper all you need is eyeballs. Today, we are creating innumerable digital artifacts, but most of these artifacts are out of our control. They are stored on servers, in databases, gated behind an internet connection, and login to a cloud service. Even the files on your hard drive use proprietary formats that make them incompatible with older systems and other tools. […] If you want your writing to still be readable on a computer from the 2060s or 2160s, it’s important that your notes can be read on a computer from the 1960s. You should want the files you create to be durable, not only for posterity, but also for your future self. You never know when you might want to go back to something you created years or decades ago. Don’t lock your data into a format you can’t retrieve. These days I write using an app I help make called Obsidian, but it’s a delusion to think it will last forever. The app will eventually become obsolete. It’s the plain text files I create that are designed to last. Who knows if anyone will want to read them besides me, but future me is enough of an audience to make it worthwhile. Steph Ango, File over App, https://stephango.com/file-over-app

But why should things be saved? Everything is deeply intertwingled. We save for knowledge and nostalgia, but what we thought was knowledge often turns to nostalgia, and nostalgia often brings us deeper insights that cut across our lives and very selves. Ted Nelson, Computer Lib/Dream Machines, The Heritage

Computers offer an interesting daydream: that we may be able to store things digitally instead of physically. In other words, turn the libraries to digital storage (see Hypertexts); digitize paintings and photographs (see "Picture Processing);even digitize the genetic codes of animals, so that species can be restored at future dates (see "The Hitiest Computer,"). Digital storage possesses several special advantages. Digitally stored materials may be copied by automatic meanB; corrective measures are possible, to prevent errors from creeping In— i.e., "no deterioration" In principle; and they could be kept in various places, lessening man- kind's dependence on its eggs being all in one basket (like the Library at Alexandria, whose burning during the occupation of Julius Caesar was one of the greatest losses in human history). But this would of course require far more compact and reliable forms of digital storage than exist right now. Nevertheless, we better start thinking about it. Ted Nelson, Computer Lib/Dream Machines, The Heritage

Paper moulders. Microfilm is inconvenient. In the best libraries it takes at least minutes to get a particular thing. But as to linking them together - footnoting Aeschylus with Marcus Aurelius, linking genetic data to 15th-century accounts of Indian tribes - well, you can only do it on paper by writing something new that ties them together. Isn't that ridiculous? When you could do it all electronically in seconds? Ted Nelson, Computer Lib/Dream Machines, Hypertext