LOOK WHO'S COMPETING!

[<acad!3HARBOR!Theodor_Nelson>]

In the group meeting on Tuesday, I waved the 
Hypermedia issue of Electronics (Feb 90), 
especially an article with pictures of me and 
Engelbart and van Dam.  I hadn't read it all 
when I showed it to you.  

Toward the end I find: 

       Van Dam is lining up venture capital 
    to launch Praxis, a Providence startup 
    that will produce an electronic media 
    system for technical documentation.            [ WHOA! ]
    And Nelson's Xanadu system will be 
    released later this year initially for Sun 
    Microsystems Inc. work stations.  "It is 
    an interconnection and history server 
    that will revise the way that informa- 
    tion is used in every field," he says.  

The article ends with several paragraphs 
of sententious stuff from Van Dam that is 
just as true now as when I said it.  Note: 

       Still to be ironed out 
    are standards for hypertext.                   [ RIGHT! ]
    "No hypertext systems are compatible 
    and they cannot swap information," 
    says van Dam.  Standards efforts are un- 
    der way to bury link services within           [ EH?! ]
    the operating system.  That would en- 
    able writers of application software to 
    build in hypertext capabilities.  

Sound like a good idea?  

Van Dam has been competing with me since 1957, 
when he appeared as the CIA spy in my rock musical
at Swarthmore.  Back when almost nobody had 
heard of the CIA, of course.  


Theodor