Hello 🌍 HyperTalk
A community for personal computing, week 1.
Last week-end after the first few weeks of the new twitter manager, it dawned on me that if twitter was to go down one day I would lose a lot. Over the last few years twitter has brought me some of the most intellectually stimulating relationships I ever had, the best reading list I ever had, new friends and even investors!
I then realized that I don’t even have the email addresses or phone numbers of people I am exchanging so much with on that platform. In a way this seems great, a testament to the “livable anonymity” that exists on the web and that we should strive to protect. With all of that in mind I opened a discord server (I know, it could become another problem) and posted the link on twitter. The goal was simple: to have a directory of people and conversations if twitter was to change too much or just experience a big outage. After a few days, 130 people had joined HyperTalk.
By any measure, it is still a very modest community but I’m happy to see that a few people are posting there regularly and seem to find some value in those conversations. It is (for now) a nice space to hang out! I hope that it will grow somehow but in a calm and “cozy” way.
So, what is HyperTalk, what will it be and why is it named Hypertalk?
Now: A discord server where people can gather to talk about computer history, the future of computing and show their projects (commercial or not). If it can also help companies or projects get off the ground by giving them access to a pool of beta testers, that’s even better!
Later: This newsletter for instance, that we’ll try to edit and publish each week as a kind of digest of what has happened on HyperTalk.
Even later: A community for people that wants computing to feel personal again. Personal Computing has a long history, some people say that it starts in 1977 with the “great trinity” of personal computers introduced that year (the Commodore PET, the Tandy TRS-80 and the Apple ][). Others will say that it starts earlier or later depending on the introduction of a chip, a research paper or another event.
To me it starts on August 13th 1973 when Lee Felsenstein put a “Public Access Computer” at Berkeley. The goal of Felsenstein was to see if the computer could become a communal memory where each user could add to the common body of knowledge (it worked really well, if you want to learn more you can read this paper).
That’s exactly what I hope for HyperTalk. I hope that by having a space with all those nice, clever people, we will come up with cool ideas, discussions and maybe one day, projects.
And what happened on HyperTalk this week?
Channels and topics were created! First, channels for companies and their founders to allow them to show demos and give updates on their products or projects. I believe that this could be one of the nice things about HyperTalk: a central place to get some updates on a project you like without having to subscribe to each discord/newsletter. The channels we created are:
Fermat: the spatial canvas to unblock you with AI (and a dope language to script it). Fermat also has its own discord server and twitter account if you want to follow them more closely.
Mintter: a decentralized knowledge collaboration application for open communities powered by a knowledge graph. A great project that you can also follow on their GitHub, Twitter account or Discord server.
kosmik: The spatial browser to explore ideas, also based on a database relying on IPFS (disclaimer: Kosmik is my own company but I intend to keep HyperTalk completely independent). Here is our discord, twitter and newsletter.
meemo: A playful environment for visual programming on the web, with web media. You can follow the progress on v2 here on github.
gems: A spatial canvas to understand your notes, brainstorming and whiteboarding sessions. Gems allow you to pull content from other locations and analyse them with AI to reveal insights, similarities or arguments.
We also created channels for more general topics like:
Future of computing:
On that one we talked about visual programming but also about keyboards: are they here forever? Will they change? Would we be able to interact with computers without keyboards and what could replace them?
That discussion around keyboards and their future drifted towards “input/output” and this article where the author explains how he records himself 24/7 and then process all of those audio files with an AI… As a side note this discussion re-ignited my interest in the “Shift Happens” book that Martin Wichary is still (as far as I know) working on. You can check the original medium article here.
That input/output problem has been one of the hardest challenge in computer science and especially in personal computing. Jef Raskin for example is famous for not liking the mouse as an object and for advocating for a mouse without buttons. He thought that switching from the mouse to the keyboard and vice versa was adding a heavy cognitive burden on the user. To add a counterpoint to that discussion, here is the demo of “Leap technology”, a navigation mechanism invented by Raskin and used in the Canon CAT:
But if we input audio (through dictation) and then get text in return (text to speech) where can we go from there? Here is a very interesting article about “mixed media” and how video, text and audio can work together to form Timed-text - from the article: Timed text is formed when the discrete words in a transcript are aligned to the continuous audio stream that gives rise to it. All monospace text in this blogpost is timed-text, allowing you to click each word to hear the source recording. A very interesting read: https://cristobal.space/writing/video-text
Finally the discussion ended on alternative controls and this twitter thread:
Still in the same channel, our friends at Fermat had a tough question that I’m copying here because it may be interesting to think about it for a longer period of time:
what if two users, in a multiplayer setting want to run code at the same time, with a shared runtime? This code is event based, must run with 0 latency to user input so running on the cloud is out of the question. One naïve solution would be to have the event "initiator" user run code locally & propagate the results to other users, but this causes a race condition when other users are also initiating events in the same runtime.
And (maybe) a part of the answer: https://arxiv.org/abs/1901.01930
Computing history
HyperTalk would not be complete without a “computing history” channel. That one didn’t see a lot of activity this week but I’m sure it will become one of the most vibrant part of this community soon! Our friend Lorenzo (founder of Gems) reposted this amazing website from Jack Rusher with an enormous amount of classic human computer interactions demo videos: https://jackrusher.com/classic-ux/.
If you don’t know what to do this Sunday, just browse through!
University of computing
This is a long term project that a lot of participants in HyperTalk would one day love to see get off the ground. Pol Baladas (founder of Fermat) is the strongest advocate for a university of computing and I’m 100% with him. But, why?
Because computing is a field in itself and not only for engineering/science. They must exists, the digital humanities. It’s not enough to read the foundational papers from Engelbart, Licklider or Nelson. There is a philosophical, moral, and political theory of computing that must be written and debated! Because computing is still seen mainly as an engineering problem, we lack the tools necessary to analyse the evolution of interfaces, their influence on our cognition and what it means to use a computer. As always, on the fringe, theories are already written, ideas debated and projects builded. People talk at length about Satoshi, but do you know the OG crypto-anarchist, Wei Dai? Have you read b-money, his paper (quoted by Satoshi in the bitcoin paper)? Here is a short quote from it (emphasis by me):
I am fascinated by Tim May's crypto-anarchy. Unlike the communities traditionally associated with the word "anarchy", in a crypto-anarchy the government is not temporarily destroyed but permanently forbidden and permanently unnecessary.It's a community where the threat of violence is impotent because violence is impossible, and violence is impossible because its participants cannot be linked to their true names or physical locations.
If this is not a political theory I don’t know what it is! And that theory is only possible because Wei Dai is looking at the technical progress of the late 90’s: the web, the arrival of broadband connectivity and the dissemination of personal computing on a greater scale. We need to understand the inventions, but also the inventors and their time.
Reading list:
This channel is one of my favorite, people just post fantastic things to read! Several people posted recommandations of foundational articles about computer history or computing in general. Here are the links:
Bret’s Victor bookshelf.
Bret’s Victor digital bookshelf.
The early history of smalltalk (by Alan Kay, properly laid out by Bret Victor).
Man Computer Symbiosis by J.C.R Licklider.
The ViewPoint Research Institute directory. In that one you’ll be able to find all the most important articles by Alan Kay (notably, A Computer for Children of All Ages that describes the Dynabook) but also from other researchers that to this day are still publishing some of the most interesting work in the computing and HCI field.
I also found that article in ACM digital library (you should subscribe, it’s a gold mine) about “The design and long-term use of a personal electronic notebook”. It’s very interesting to see the author (Thomas Erickson, a great HCI researcher) go through the design and then usage of what really feels like a proto version of Roam Research daily pages (all made in HyperCard on a PowerBook of course 😇 ).
Iian from Codex also reposted this great episode from Notion’s “Tools and Craft” podcast with Alan Kay.
We finally finished the week by discussing the “form of a document”. What is a document? What is it in a HyperText environment? This article gives us a few answers: http://this.how/whatIsADocument/. Iian (@codexeditor on discord) posted a great response to the article that I want to repost here because I think it sums up the great debate between markdown advocates and “classic hypertext” (in the Nelsonian term) advocates: “
I'm afraid I have to disagree with Dave on a few of the features that a fediverse document ought to have:
simple styling
markdown support
links
My worry is that for 2022 this is a too reductive conception of the document. I would really hope that a modern document would have the following features at minimum:
rich styling
a format which supports overlapping and overlaid annotations, to enable collaborative commenting and text enrichment
rather than just links, I think all markup should be of the nature of "typed links with metadata"
Furthermore, it would be excellent if documents could also export or at least link to a knowledge graph of the relevant entities marked up in the document, along of course with all of the multimedia assets required by the document such as images, videos, embedded content, and ideally marginalia, also.
For the above reasons, I think Markdown is uniquely unqualified to act as a universal hyper-document format for 2022 and beyond ...
Thankfully, the great team at Ink and Switch also has an answer about “what is a document?”, their article can be found here. The podcast about “Dynamic documents” from the same researchers:
Finally some channels around specific problems or challenges were created. For now we have:
Spatial UI design
stand off properties
decentralized storage
Those channels are already containing good conversations but I’ll let them develop a bit more before summarizing the debates/discussions here!
Thank you so much for reading this first issue! I wrote all of this on a plane from Paris to New-York, which is why I want to conclude this first digest by quoting the Early History of Smalltalk by Alan Kay:
“I’m writing this introduction in an airplane at 35,000 feet. On my lap is a five pound notebook computer—1992's "Interim Dynabook"—by the end of the year it sold for under $700. It has a flat, crisp, high-resolution bitmap screen, overlapping windows, icons, a pointing device, considerable storage and computing capacity, and its best software is object-oriented. It has advanced networking built-in and there are already options for wireless networking. Smalltalk runs on this system, and is one of the main systems I use for my current work with children. In some ways this is more than a Dynabook (quantitatively), and some ways not quite there yet (qualitatively). All in all, pretty much what was in mind during the late sixties.”
What has changed since 1992? We are eagerly waiting for you on Hypertalk discord server ❤️
Paul
Post-scriptum: a fun twitter account to follow if you like classic MacOS and its quirkiness: https://twitter.com/MacintoshThemes