I first went online in 1995, back when you paid by the hour for an extremely slow connection. At the time, my concept of the internet only went as far as what America Online would show me. Actual websites existed, of course, but between the slow speed and my unfamiliarity, I mostly stuck with chat rooms,span class="readmore"a href="https://dinosaurdracula.com/blog/old-internet-junk/"Read More/a/span
For some time I’ve been following an emerging subculture on Twitter. I have referred to it occasionally as “stoner Twitter poets”, but as it attains consciousness of itself as a p…
Today the book is already… an outdated mediation between two different filing systems. For everything that matters is to be found in the card box of the researcher who wrote it, and the scholar studying it assimilates it into his own card index. - Walter Benjamin
Calendars cover the entire spectrum of time. Past, present and future. They are the closest thing we have to a time machine. Calendars allow us to travel forward in time and see the future. More importantly, they allow us to change the future.
Let me introduce you to WordStar 4.0, a popular word processor from the early 80s.
WordStar 4.0
As old as it seems, George R.R. Martin used it to write “A Song of Ice and Fire”.
Why would someone use such an old piece of software to write over 5,000 pages? I love how he puts it:
It does everything I want a word processing program to do and it doesn't do anything else.
Hi. My name is Cabel. And I’ve probably got the neatest job in the whole world. I wear many hats. But here on my personal blog, I get to write about the things I really care about, just for y…
John Gruber’s Daring Fireball debuted in 2002. The “linked list”, his version of the linklog, did not appear until 2004. It was a separate page and an RSS feed intended as a perk for his paid subscribers. At some point in 2005, it shifted to the main column of the site along with the regular posts.
Hypertext means more than just text with a bunch of links in it Hypertext is something of a neglected subject these days. Everyone is talking about the Web, but nobody is talking about the class of…
Top-down emphasizes the collection rather than the item, allowing items into the collection only by blessing from on high, rather than by their own action. It thus inhibits individual contributions and funnels decision making through a single point, often introducing delay and compromising immediacy.
Top down favors the static over the dynamic, wanting each piece to be fixed in its assigned place in the hierarchy. It inhibits spontaneous addition, editing, and deletion, for fear of compromising the structure of the top-down edifice.
I've often thought there is a subtle art to the humble hyperlink, that stalwart building block of hypertext, the stuff that Ted Nelson's Xanadu dream was made of. The word hypertext was coined by Nelson and published in a paper delivered to a national conference of the Association for Computing
We’re experiencing a content overload. There are an average of 550 new social media users each minute, and over 40,000 search queries on Google every second. The Facebook like button has been pressed 13 trillion times, and each new day welcomes another 682 million tweets. It seems that every time we blink there’s a new podcast published, or blog post to read, or book recommendation to order on Amazon. To make a long story short, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to disaggregate signal from noise.
Living a plaintext-only life is tempting. But the further one goes with plaintext, the more they re-invent Markdown or HTML. Let's just give up and live hypertext life instead.