"Put down that wrench!"

thegreatgonzo questioned these seven interests, if you want me to ask about yours, comment below.

4ad

A rather good independent record label. The people who brought the world The Pixies, Dead Can Dance, The Cocteau Twins, M/A/R/R/S, and so on.

ansible

Dave Langford's multi-Hugo-winning fanzine/semi-prozine. Also an anagram of 'lesbian'.

looney labs

A small games company with a reputation for quirky games: Fluxx, Chrononauts, Icehouse.

magic realism

I'm rather fond of the works of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Jorge Luis Borges.

plokta

Another Hugo-winning fanzine.

salt and sauce

The only thing worth putting on chips. I sneer at your gravy.

xanadu

I remember when this World Wide Web was all Silverstands... One of the great what-ifs of computing history (second only to Babbage, I'd say), Xanadu was Ted Nelson's plan for a global hypertext system. In (sporadic) development since the 1960s, and arguably no closer to a releasable product than it was then, sadly.

Some years ago, back when I was in sixth form and trying to decide what I wanted to study at University, the BBC broadcast a Horizon documentary on novel interfaces for computers, which was presented by Douglas Adams and Tom Baker. The documentary presented a future information system in which you could follow links between documents, images and videos, with software "agents" that helped you find things. More than anything else, it was a novel documentary by itself; how better to show what a new information system might be like, than to film the documentary as if it were being presented by that information system.

The memory of this documentary, Hyperland, stayed with me, and was one of the reasons why I decided to read computer science rather than electronics (this book and this book were the other reasons). Moving forward a few years, I first came across the Web in the autumn of 1993, with the release of the Mosaic browser (I can still remember various of my contemporaries, possibly including evildespot and perdita_fysh, telling me that the Web wouldn't come to anything).

The early Web was quite exhilarating, but it still didn't live up to the promise of Hyperland. I graduated and moved to Cambridge. As I got more disillusioned with my employer (a certain large Scandinavian mobile telecoms company that isn't Ericsson), I spent more time reading academic papers on the subject of hypertext and agents. In order to get a better grounding in AI, I studied for my Masters in Edinburgh. After that, I looked around for PhD places, and found that the University of Southampton was the place to go in the UK if you wanted to do research on hypertext.

The rest, as they say, is history.

This isn't exactly news, but it may interest some of you. First, a bit of computer history. In 1968, Doug Englebart gave a ninety-minute demonstration of NLS at the Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco. NLS, the oNLine System, had been under development by the Augmentation Research Center at Stanford since 1962, and had a number of features which we now consider commonplace: the mouse, outline lists, hypertext links, and so on.

The demo was filmed at the time, and there have been copies and fragments of varying quality floating around ever since. Some enterprising soul has now uploaded the full film to Google Video; the text isn't particularly clear, and there are some audio artifacts, but it's still an intriguing glimpse of how the present day used to look when it was still the future.