Tue, 26 Jul 2005
Ted Nelson -- Inventor of Hypertext
I'll be honest, I had no intension of sitting through this session but
after buying Perl Testing: A Developer's Notebook and Perl Best Practices I
was too late to even stand in the Media Hacking session so I went back to
the big theatre and sat through what was possibly (in my opinion) the
worst session of the day. Now I know Ted Nelson is a smart guy and he's
got some very interesting ideas and perspectives but as a speaker I didn't
like him.
His whole talk was about how modern computers have got a lot of things wrong by using a paper metaphor for documents, using databases for storage and a lot of bits like that. In general he's against hierarchy and for a more free form, floaty way of doing things. And while he presented a couple of good ideas the only live demo he gave was of a genealogy program that looked like a game of connect four gone insane had me sitting there thinking "I deal with people that can't copy and paste. They'd have an aneurism if I showed them that."
In general I didn't like this session as the speaker was very preachy, grandiose, pompous and not very enthralling. The oddest part was a story about his grandfather and a pressure cooker. The short version is that due to bad design his grandfather was injured by a spray of boiling potatoes. Unfortunately the way the story was told most of us (this part of the session came up a lot afterwards!) were expecting some amusing anecdote and ended up feeling guilty when the story ended with a man who only had his sight saved by a pair of glasses.
Like this post? - Digg Me! | Add to del.icio.us! | reddit this!
Posted: 2005/07/26 11:07 | /events | Permanent link to this entry | This entry and same date
Copyright © 2000-2010 Dean Wilson
