
in this
section:
resources
dates |
Vinton
Cerf's memoir
for the Smithsonian oral history program is online. He
also wrote a brief memoir
in 1993.
Snapshots of Licklider, Baran and other fathers of the
Net are online
as part of Hafner's disappointingly thin 'Wizards'
site.
Licklider's Man-Computer Symbiosis and The Computer
As Communication Device (PDF)
are online. He's the subject of Mitchell Waldrop's The
Dream Machine: JCR Licklider & the Revolution That
Made Computing Personal (New York: Viking 2001).
Robert Kahn, former DARPA/ARPANET guru and knowbot inventor,
has a staid bio
on the Corporation for National Research Initiatives site.
Jon Postel, another progenitor of the Internet, is commemorated
on the Internet Engineering Steering Group (IESG)
site.
This site includes a profile
of mathematician Claude Shannon.
For Yuri Rubinky, SGML pioneer, see his memorial
page.
Ted
[Theodor Holm] Nelson, hypermedia guru and proponent of
global digital library Xanadu was memorably profiled
in Wired and in Matt Kazmierski's more academic
The World Wide Web: The Beginning & Now site.
Nelson's home page
is worth a visit, particularly for the account
of Xanadu. He notes that
Project
Xanadu, the original hypertext project, is often misunderstood
as an attempt to create the World Wide Web. It has always
been much more ambitious, proposing an entire form of
literature where links do not break as versions change;
where documents may be closely compared side by side
and closely annotated; where it is possible to see the
origins of every quotation; and in which there is a
valid copyright system - a literary, legal and business
arrangement - for frictionless, non-negotiated quotation
at any time and in any amount. The Web trivialized this
original Xanadu model, vastly but incorrectly simplifying
these problems to a world of fragile ever-breaking one-way
links, with no recognition of change or copyright, and
no support for multiple versions or principled re-use.
Fonts and glitz, rather than content connective structure,
prevail.
In
2005 he lamented
that the Wired profile
is
a sewer of lies, concealments and fabrications, steaming
with malice, ...to dishonor and destroy our work, to
annihilate our reputations and our ideas, to hide the
depth and integrity of the Xanadu project and present
us as clueless bozos; to make sure we had no access
to respect or funding, even in the dot-com feeding frenzy
that was underway; and above all to deny us any credit
for the thinking behind the World Wide Web. So
far its dastardly purposes have been quite successful.
Nelson
modestly claims that
I
intend it will become known to posterity as a classic
of deceit next to the Protocols of Zion.
For
Douglas Engelbart a useful starting point is the Mousesite
at Stanford Uni and Thierry Bardini's Bootstrapping:
Douglas Engelbart, Coevolution and the Origins of Personal
Computing (Stanford: Stanford Uni Press 2000).
There is a wider view in Steve Lohr's Go To: The Story
of the Math Majors, Bridge Players, Engineers, Chess Wizards,
Maverick Scientists and Iconoclasts - the Programmers
Who Created the Software Revolution (New York: Basic
Books 2001), which for us is as over-written as its title.
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