Old computer Challenge week 2025 for July 18th

Time flies when you're having fun, huh?

Today I mostly want to talk about Mark's incredible cyberhole
(.online).

https://mdhughes.tech/2025/07/15/old-computer-challenge/

Well, actually the non-old-computer-challenge markwrites immediately
before it:

https://mdhughes.tech/2025/04/22/some-of-my-history-of-hypertext/

in which mdhughes explains his computing origin in the books (to just
rip off his article)

Stimulating Simulations (Engel '77), Creative Computing Magazine
(ed. Ahl '74-'85), Basic Computer Games, Microcomputer Edition (Ahl
'78), Unnamed TRS-80 BASIC book, My Computer Likes Me When I Speak
BASIC (Albrecht '72) and Computer Lib/Dream Machines (Nelson '74-75).

Mdh follows Nelson's trajectory past the life and death of Hypercard,
"The Future We Didn't Get" to his eventual own traumatic realization
that Xanadu was never arriving as such.

Absolutely great article, best paired with Mark introducing everyone
to his cyberhole.online for OCC.

Now, I did not know anything about Ted Nelson prior to knowing
mdh. People would sometimes say things to me - Kent Pitman mentioned
reading Literary Machines in his post ex facto writeup of his Cross
Referenced Editing Facility back at MIT, but, well, I haven't read it
yet, I haven't read Computer Lib/Dream Machines yet either.

But I think I can add one paragraph you didn't know.

About a year ago I got a message from someone on the Mastodon - the
only message I have ever received that was explicitly about Erik
Sandewall's CAISOR paradigm - all that software stuff and that 50 year
openaccess bibliography I collected.

The message said something like, "CAISOR and XANADU were the two
rivals for the future of computing, eh?" with a link to this youtube
channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/TheTedNelson . I had absolutely
no idea what was being said to me or what Xanadu was or whom this
message came from, and the conversation didn't pick up. Much later, I
think it was WeekendEditor (Dylan?) on the Mastodon that might have
explained more of Nelson to me speaking from a position of personal
friendship and asking that people not be unkind to Nelson's work as a
sincere visionary helping us towards an unknown better future (on a
mention of web microtransactions, an idea that perhaps aged poorly).


If I can add something about Sandewall's work, of which I am some kind
of scholar.

Related to what I've been doing- Sandewall didn't think it was
reasonable to just copy a software, similar to the philosophical
problems of making an exact clone of a developed human with memories
intact.

Obviously the lisp hacker's copy of a software is a living,
acclimating, continuously existing one in a sort of mixed initiative
relationship with that one hacker. Then deploying software might be
more like deliberately breeding a mule - a sterile but very work
suitable hybrid somewhat derived from the programmer's personal
software, but really with only a small contribution of
what-its-donkey-parent-is-actually-like, with another initial
contribution from say, the software equivalent of a mule's mare
mother, though the new 'deployed' software itself is sterile and quite
different to either parent.

This is why in the Leonardo system, while your interactions that grow
an individual are intricate, the outcome at runtime of most of the
programmer's contribution ends up in attributes in property lists on
symbols, and the sterile mule of deployment, not capable of the rich
and dynamic lives of its parent, is initially just a dump of some
attributes in its parent's plist, with contributions from another
parent's attributes who has learned things about the target deployment
environment.

Sorry, I wanted to have some kinds of original contribution this occ
article.


Returning to mdh's notes and living experience of software for a
moment.

Maybe old computer challenge is not best viewed as an experience of
retro hardware or software, but as a forward compatible receiving
point for hyperlinks from the past.