Book People Archive

Re: Early ebook history info wanted; "Alice"; Brown Corpus; Vannevar...


I have divided my responsed into three messages reflecting
the three sections Mr. Noring used in his message.

Part 2

***

On Thu, 12 Jan 2006, Jon Noring wrote:

> David Reed wrote:
>> hart@[redacted] writes:


> So let's look at some facts regarding what else was going on
> *before* Michael entered his text in 1971. This came from info just
> posted to the 'ebook-history' Yahoo group by Bill Janssen:
>
>
> 1) Doug Engelbart -- Mr. NLS/Augment
>
> "NLS, developed in the 60's, was a "powered exoskeleton" for human
> intelligence which actually implemented much of the 'everything linked
> everywhere" hypertext ideas Ted Nelson talked about. His 1968 FJCC
> paper, "A Reseach Center for Augmenting Human Intellect", may be the
> first e-document in continuous e-publication for over 35 years. The
> accompanying 1968 demo drove 30 years of subsequent research by
> others.... NLS was a basic hypertext format. Every paragraph was
> tagged with an identifier (a "location number") so that it could be
> referenced (in HTML, we call these anchors)."

As you know, I have serious doubts that this document was in any kind of
"e-document in continuous e-publication for over 35 years."

The version I read online just didn't look like it was written in 1968.

As you have likely seen my notes concerning the fact that I had to redo
our first files to get them from all CAPS to upper and lower case, when
I finally got a terminal that would DO lower case by installing ye olde
famous 1488 and 1489 ASCII chip upgrades.

By the way, I also had to do this with the Paradise Lost tape, that was
SOOO hard to read that we gave up on it many times before getting it.

This makes the Paradise Lost tape I received in late 1991 or early 1992
seem much more likely to have been a copy of a 1960s or 1970's file.

However, I have no evidence other than that.


> The 1968 NLS etext document still exists, as well as a running demo.
> This whole concept included *all* kinds of texts, including books.
> There is even a video demonstrating this NLS demo in action.

There is a major difference between a laboratory demonstration and an
event that takes place in the real world.

What if Edison had invented the light bulb, but had never taken it in
to any real world applications or even patented it?

What if Bell had invented the telephone in the same manner?



> After all, and this is important: books were already being digitized
> in 1968, so there was no need to even single them out. The focus was
> not on how to digitize books -- it was *already being done*, but how
> to make digital texts work in the future, including direct use by
> end-users.

Putting books IN a computer is different than getting them OUT.

In these cases the number of people who could get them out was limited
to an extreme few who never existed outside the laboratory.

How many of these computers were ever actually sold?

Did they all contain all the demonstrated materials?

Is this sample indicative of a real world event?

Given what we know about Englebart's willingness to publish results in
a pretty spectacular manner, and to follow up on them, it is hard from
this perspective to conclude that he had any idea of the potential the
eBooks could represent.

Demonstrating that something CAN be done, is not the same as DOING it.

As before, I have stong suspicions that this document was not in
continuous publication for over 35 years, at least not in the way
I saw it when I first read it years ago.

I also have some serious doubts that it was "in publication" in what a
normal sense of that would entail.



> Again, this was in 1968.

And he patented the mouse in 1971, but never followed up with eBooks.

Why not?

The only conclusion possible is that he didn't see eBooks as anything
of any value, and they ended up merely as manuals and demos but never
got out into any real world applications.



Give the world eBooks in 2006!!!

Michael S. Hart
Founder
Project Gutenberg