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December 31 2000 | Stanford University are streaming the video of Douglas Engelbart's 1968 demo of the NLS system in which he showed hyperlinking, windows, etc. in working order.
August 25 1999 | Looks like I did Ted Nelson (pages 218-221) an injustice.  At any rate, I gave the impression that his Xanadu project was too ambitious ever to come to fruition.  But yesterday, Nelson and his team astonished the world by releasing the Xanadu code.  Naturally, it's Open Source.   You can download it from here, but when I tried this morning the server was signalling heavy overload.  Note the joke in the URL. Jon Udell wrote this report for Byte on Ted's big surprise.
September 4 1999 | If you were puzzled by why the Open Source movement is so punctilious about using JPEG rather than GIF images on its web sites, then this article from Slashdot is very revealing.  In a nutshell, the problem is that GIF compression relies on a proprietary compression algorithm which is the intellectual property of Unisys.
September 12 1999 | There is an article in Salon about Richard Barbrook's essay speculating on whether free-software hackers are undermining capitalism and the free-market economy with their code giveaways.
September 17 1999 | The idea (page 171) that there could be 'elegance' in computer code puzzled several (non-technical) readers.  There's an interesting article in Salon about the work of Donald Knuth, who is famous for a magisterial series of books on The Art of Computer Programming.  Knuth thinks there should be a Pulitzer Prize for programming.
October 1 1999 | At last -- Tim Berners-Lee has given his own account of how he created the Web.  His book, Weaving the Web (Orion Business Books, 1999), has to be the definitive account.  It's divided into two parts.   The first tells of the genesis of the Web at CERN; the second relates how the World Wide Web Consortium was set up and goes on to give a masterful exposition of some of the main issues the Consortium is grappling with.  If you're intrigued by my account of the genesis of the Web then you will really enjoy Tim's book.  And perhaps you will appreciate why I dedicated A Brief History to him.

I've done an interview with Berners-Lee.

There's also a nice piece in the Web edition of the New York Times (which is free but you need to subscribe) in which Tim reveals his irritation with all those people who insist on asking why he didn't want to make money from the Web.
November 2 1999 | Eric Raymond's essays on Open Source matters have been published in book form by O'Reilly Associates. Of course you can get them all on the Web, but sometimes it's nice to have a copy on one's shelves.  Much the same holds for the O'Reilly book Open Sources collection (edited by diBona et.al.)
November 7 1999 | Professor Lawrence Lessig, Berkman Professor of Law at Harvard, writes an influential column in the Industry Standard.  In this piece, entitled "Architecting Innovation", he has picked up on my account of Paul Baran's difficulties with telephone giant AT&T and the resistance its officials and engineers offered to the packet-switching idea.  "In its [AT&T's] view", Lessig writes, "packet-switching just couldn't fly. But as, of course, it eventually did fly (though not until many years after Rand tabled Baran's proposal), why was AT&T so wrong?
   One clue is an exchange between Baran and AT&T's Jack Osterman. As Naughton recounts, after a long discussion, Osterman in some frustration said to Baran, 'First, it can't possibly work, and if it did, damned if we are going to allow the creation of a competitor to ourselves.'

'Allow.'

The key to the Internet's extraordinary innovation is that it doesn't allow a term like 'allow.' It's architected to disallow it."

Lessig is rightly frustrated that many people currently trying to impose commercial order on the Intenet fail to appreciate that in doing so they may stifle the creativity that its open architecture enables.  He has developed these ideas in a number of lectures (see his Harvard site) and a terrific, sobering book, Code -- and other laws of Cyberspace (Basic Books, 1999). Stewart Brand has described Lessig as "a James Madison of our time, crafting the lineaments of a well-tempered cyberspace."
December 2 1999 | There's a lovely piece in Salon magazine about the Australian computer scientist John Lions who died in 1998.   Lions became legendary in the UNIX community because he produced an annotated edition of the kernel's source code which he used to teach his students.  The article describes him as the man who "wrote the first, and perhaps only, literary criticism of Unix" -- and who sparked off a copyright war in so doing.

January 1 2000 |

 One of the things that puzzled me when writing the book was why Jim Clark took Netscape public so early.   The company was set up in April 1994.  Its first browser was launched at the end of the year and the IPO was in August when it was burning money and chronically unprofitable.  At the time most venture capitalists thought that you needed four consecutive profitable quarters before going public.  So why did Clark do it?   The answer, revealed by Michael Lewis in The New, New Thing, his terrific biography of Clark, is that he needed the money to build an even bigger yacht than the one he already owned!  So much for rational reconstructions of history.
 

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