hard deadlines

NYU's Mac classroom, 1987, waiting to be unpacked.

I had seen the "1984" SuperBowl commercial, of course, and had laid hands on that boxy ecru first-generation mouse at Macy's in Herald Square, and I knew, from the very first, that the Macintosh was a game-changer. I had been programming since 1973, when our amazing, crazy high-school math teacher had convinced the school to put in two punched-paper-tape teletypes hooked up to a timeshared PDP-8 somewhere off in the Big City. So I knew computers. Or I thought I did. Until I saw the Mac.

It was love at first sight, and it is hard to remember, now that graphical user interfaces are all around us, what an innovation the bitmapped screen was. How natural it felt to move files around by dragging and dropping. And to paint, with a mouse? Anyone who remembers paint programs from the Apple II (and I have a Polaroid somewhere that I will try to dig up and post to Flickr) was agape with wonder at MacPaint.

And now, it is 25 years later. Last week marked the anniversary of the introduction of the modern computer age. Like the Gutenberg printing press or the Sumerian invention of writing, this was one of the flex points of communication technology. Just as it took 50 years after the invention of printing for someone to come up with the idea of page numbers, it took about the same length of time to evolve a human interface into the power of computing. And from that interface came everything we know today about the Web.

In a very literal sense. The Web came directly out of hypertext research that was being done here in Rhode Island at Brown University, where one of the pioneers of the medium, Prof. George Landow, latched onto the Mac early and with the team at Brown built Intermedia, one of the first hypertext systems. Exclusively for the Mac. At the University of North Carolina, John Smith, Jay David Bolter, and Michael Joyce were doing the same thing with a desktop hypertext tool called Storyspace. For the Mac. And at Apple, Bill Atkinson, who had been one of the key programmers on MacPaint, unloaded HyperCard on the world in 1987. Which was, BTW, the year of the first hypertext conference, and the year I was privileged to be part of a very special group at New York University that started teaching freshman composition using that room full of computers from the top graphic. And we started teaching them how to do hypertext essays. In 1987. On Macintoshes.

It was this yeasty, bubbling environment of graphical goodness, that put the face on the World Wide Web. Which was developed on a NeXT machine, Steve Jobs' summer gig between stints as Apple CEO.

We live in an amazing time. Take a few minutes to look back. Check out MacWorld magazine's coverage of "25 Years of the Mac."

ArtCom Digest on The Well, December, 1992

The author would like to thank Abbe Don for her comments & support.

Down among the dancing quanta,
Everything exists at once.
Up above in Transverse City,
Every weekend lasts for months...

—Warren Zevon, Transverse City

Jay David Bolter, in a talk at the MLA two years ago [1990], spoke about Richard Lanham's duality of hypertext: the dialectic of node and link, or as he put it, "looking at" vs. "looking through." The reader experiencing the text, Bolter said, is "aware of oscillation; [and this is an] explicit measure of interaction." Ultimately, he was arguing, hypertext wants to be both at the same time. Text which can present itself as surface, and yet effortlessly yield through to other levels. Hearing this, I immediately began to suspect this hypermedia duality was the mirror and analogue of the duality of particle and wave, of energy and matter, in physics. What we are seeing in hypermedia is the appearance on the macrolevel (of 2-meter humans and similar Objects) of quantum reality.

ACM SigWeb Newsletter, 2000

ABSTRACT

Cognate problems in computation, animal behavior, and psychotheraphy are employed as lenses into issues confronting hypertext narrative. The suggestion is that a similar need for jumping out of the system drives self-transcendence in these areas — with potential significance for the construction of hypertext narratives.

KEYWORDS
Hypertext fiction, hypertext narrative, hypertext literature, artifactual hypertext

INTRODUCTION
With a title like "Halting, Sphexishness, and Analysis, Terminable and Interminable," I feel obligated to begin by explaining just what the heck this paper is actually about. It is about hypertext fiction. In the next few pages, I will make a quick foray into Sumerian mathematics, explicate parallel self-transcendance problems in the three domains of my title, invoke E.O. Wilson's consilience, talk about roller coasters, explain why hypertext fiction has failed to catch on, and suggest what it must do to succeed going forward.