Literary Machines
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Literary Machines
''Literary Machines'' (short title) is a book first published in 1981 by Ted Nelson, and republished nine times by 1993. It offers an extensive overview of Nelson's term "hypertext" as well as Nelson's Project Xanadu. It also includes other theories by Nelson, including "tumblers" for addressing bits in files past and present, "transclusion" as a method for including original work in one's own work, and "micropayments" to pay for the use. The format of the book is nonlinear, as the chapters are arranged in such a way that the text can be read out of order. The preface to the 1993 edition states "''The first edition of ''Literary Machines,'' done on a typewriter, appeared in April of 1981. We printed it on a Saxon copier that filled the house with a vinegar smell. But it had a beautiful cover, its white title silk-screened on mirrored plastic. Since that time the book has gone through various editions with different-colored covers, printed by various people with various degrees ...
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Ted Nelson
Theodor Holm Nelson (born June 17, 1937) is an American pioneer of information technology, philosopher, and sociologist. He coined the terms ''hypertext'' and ''hypermedia'' in 1963 and published them in 1965. Nelson coined the terms ''transclusion'', ''virtuality'', and ''intertwingularity'' (in ''Literary Machines''). According to a 1997 ''Forbes'' profile, Nelson "sees himself as a literary romantic, like a Cyrano de Bergerac, or 'the Orson Welles of software'." Early life and education Nelson is the son of Emmy Award-winning director Ralph Nelson and Academy Award-winning actress Celeste Holm. His parents' marriage was brief and he was mostly raised by his grandparents, first in Chicago and later in Greenwich Village. Nelson earned a B.A. in philosophy from Swarthmore College in 1959. While there, he made an experimental humorous student film, ''The Epiphany of Slocum Furlow'', in which the titular hero discovers the meaning of life. His contemporary at the college, music ...
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Hypertext
Hypertext is E-text, text displayed on a computer display or other electronic devices with references (hyperlinks) to other text that the reader can immediately access. Hypertext documents are interconnected by hyperlinks, which are typically activated by a mouse (computing), mouse click, keypress set, or screen touch. Apart from text, the term "hypertext" is also sometimes used to describe tables, images, and other presentational content formats with integrated hyperlinks. Hypertext is one of the key underlying concepts of the World Wide Web, where Web pages are often written in the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). As implemented on the Web, hypertext enables the easy-to-use publication of information over the Internet. Etymology The English prefix "hyper-" comes from the Greek language, Greek prefix "ὑπερ-" and means "over" or "beyond"; it has a common origin with the prefix "super-" which comes from Latin. It signifies the overcoming of the previous linear con ...
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Project Xanadu
Project Xanadu ( ) was the first hypertext project, founded in 1960 by Ted Nelson. Administrators of Project Xanadu have declared it superior to the World Wide Web, with the mission statement: "Today's popular software simulates paper. The World Wide Web (another imitation of paper) trivialises our original hypertext model with one-way ever-breaking links and no management of version or contents." ''Wired'' magazine published an article called "The Curse of Xanadu", calling Project Xanadu "the longest-running vaporware story in the history of the computer industry". The first attempt at implementation began in 1960, but it was not until 1998 that an incomplete implementation was released. A version described as "a working deliverable", OpenXanadu, was made available in 2014. History Nelson's vision was for a "digital repository scheme for world-wide electronic publishing". Nelson states that the idea began in 1960, when he was a student at Harvard University. He proposed a mach ...
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Tumbler (Project Xanadu)
In the design of the Xanadu computer system, a tumbler is an address of any range of content or link or a set of ranges or links. According to Gary Wolf in ''Wired'', the idea of tumblers was that "the address would not only point the reader to the correct machine, it would also indicate the author of the document, the version of the document, the correct span of bytes, and the links associated with these bytes." Tumblers were created by Roger Gregory and Mark Miller. They were used in the Xanadu FEBE (Front End - Back End) protocol in a manner similar to the use of URIs between web browsers and servers. Concept and implementation The idea behind tumblers comes from transfinite numbers. A tumbler is a unique numerical address of any interesting artifact. It resembles an IP address, but is much larger and has much more detailed structure. The structure looks like this. 1. .0. .0. .0. The leading "1." is used in order to mark the start of a new address. The individual fields ...
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Transclusion
In computer science, transclusion is the inclusion of part or all of an electronic document into one or more other documents by reference via hypertext. Transclusion is usually performed when the referencing document is displayed, and is normally automatic and transparent to the end user. The result of transclusion is a single integrated document made of parts assembled dynamically from separate sources, possibly stored on different computers in disparate places. Transclusion facilitates modular design (using the single source of truth model, whether in data, code, or content): a resource is stored once and distributed for reuse in multiple documents. Updates or corrections to a resource are then reflected in any referencing documents. In systems where transclusion is not available, and in some situations where it is available but not desirable, substitution is often the complementary option, whereby a static copy of the single source of truth is integrated into the relevant ...
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Micropayment
A micropayment is a financial transaction involving a very small sum of money and usually one that occurs online. A number of micropayment systems were proposed and developed in the mid-to-late 1990s, all of which were ultimately unsuccessful. A second generation of micropayment systems emerged in the 2010s. While micropayments were originally envisioned to involve very small sums of money, practical systems to allow transactions of less than 1 have seen little success. One problem that has prevented the emergence of micropayment systems is a need to keep costs for individual transactions low, which is impractical when transacting such small sums even if the transaction fee is just a few cents. Definition There are a number of different definitions of what constitutes a micropayment. PayPal defines a micropayment as a transaction of less than £5 while Visa defines it as a transaction under 20 Australian dollars. History The term was coined by Ted Nelson, long before the inventi ...
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Association For Computing Machinery
The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) is a US-based international learned society for computing. It was founded in 1947 and is the world's largest scientific and educational computing society. The ACM is a non-profit professional membership group, claiming nearly 110,000 student and professional members . Its headquarters are in New York City. The ACM is an umbrella organization for academic and scholarly interests in computer science ( informatics). Its motto is "Advancing Computing as a Science & Profession". History In 1947, a notice was sent to various people: On January 10, 1947, at the Symposium on Large-Scale Digital Calculating Machinery at the Harvard computation Laboratory, Professor Samuel H. Caldwell of Massachusetts Institute of Technology spoke of the need for an association of those interested in computing machinery, and of the need for communication between them. ..After making some inquiries during May and June, we believe there is ample interest to ...
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SIGSOFT
The Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Software Engineering provides a forum for computing professionals from industry, government and academia to examine principles, practices, and new research results in software engineering. SIGSOFT focuses on issues related to all aspects of software development and maintenance, with emphasis on requirements, specification and design, software architecture, validation, verification, debugging, software safety, software processes, software management, measurement, user interfaces, configuration management, software engineering environments, and CASE tools. SIGSOFT (co-)sponsors conferences and symposia including the ''International Conference on Software Engineering'' (ICSE), the ''ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering'' (ESEC/FSE) and other events. SIGSOFT publishes the informal bimonthly newsletter ''Software Engineering Notes The ACM SIGSO ...
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Books By Ted Nelson
A book is a medium for recording information in the form of writing or images, typically composed of many pages (made of papyrus, parchment, vellum, or paper) bound together and protected by a cover. The technical term for this physical arrangement is '' codex'' (plural, ''codices''). In the history of hand-held physical supports for extended written compositions or records, the codex replaces its predecessor, the scroll. A single sheet in a codex is a leaf and each side of a leaf is a page. As an intellectual object, a book is prototypically a composition of such great length that it takes a considerable investment of time to compose and still considered as an investment of time to read. In a restricted sense, a book is a self-sufficient section or part of a longer composition, a usage reflecting that, in antiquity, long works had to be written on several scrolls and each scroll had to be identified by the book it contained. Each part of Aristotle's ''Physics'' is called a ...
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American Non-fiction Books
American(s) may refer to: * American, something of, from, or related to the United States of America, commonly known as the "United States" or "America" ** Americans, citizens and nationals of the United States of America ** American ancestry, people who self-identify their ancestry as "American" ** American English, the set of varieties of the English language native to the United States ** Native Americans in the United States, indigenous peoples of the United States * American, something of, from, or related to the Americas, also known as "America" ** Indigenous peoples of the Americas * American (word), for analysis and history of the meanings in various contexts Organizations * American Airlines, U.S.-based airline headquartered in Fort Worth, Texas * American Athletic Conference, an American college athletic conference * American Recordings (record label), a record label previously known as Def American * American University, in Washington, D.C. Sports teams Soccer * ...
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Computer Books
A computer is a machine that can be programmed to carry out sequences of arithmetic or logical operations (computation) automatically. Modern digital electronic computers can perform generic sets of operations known as programs. These programs enable computers to perform a wide range of tasks. A computer system is a nominally complete computer that includes the hardware, operating system (main software), and peripheral equipment needed and used for full operation. This term may also refer to a group of computers that are linked and function together, such as a computer network or computer cluster. A broad range of industrial and consumer products use computers as control systems. Simple special-purpose devices like microwave ovens and remote controls are included, as are factory devices like industrial robots and computer-aided design, as well as general-purpose devices like personal computers and mobile devices like smartphones. Computers power the Internet, which links bil ...
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Texts Related To The History Of The Internet
Text may refer to: Written word * Text (literary theory), any object that can be read, including: **Religious text, a writing that a religious tradition considers to be sacred **Text, a verse or passage from scripture used in expository preaching **Textbook, a book of instruction in any branch of study Computing and telecommunications *Plain text, unformatted text *Text file, a type of computer file opened by most text software *Text string, a sequence of characters manipulated by software *Text message, a short electronic message designed for communication between mobile phone users *Text (Chrome app), a text editor for the Google Chrome web browser Arts and media *TEXT, a Swedish band *''Text & Talk'' (formerly ''Text''), an academic journal *"Text", a 2010 song produced by J.R. Rotem, featuring Mann and Jason Derulo Jason Joel Desrouleaux (born September 21, 1989), known professionally as Jason Derulo (; formerly stylized as Derülo), is an American singer and songwrit ...
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