A File Structure for the Complex, the Changing, and the Indeterminate [pdf]

Andy Matuschak pointed out on Twitter that this paper from 1965 has a jaw-droppingly beautiful title, but then I read it and it's actually fascinating. It's an exploration from the idea of the memex, as imagined before personal computers were a thing, towards what kind of structure is sufficiently general to capture the vast, sprawling, inconstant domains of thought.

I understand the author must be the "Ted Nelson" (https://www.youtube.com/user/TheTedNelson). He has always been such a visionary. Such an immensely articulate person. His youtube channel is full of gems; his Computer for Cynics' series is great. His chapter on How Bitcoin Actually works (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3CMucDjJQ4E) is a "must see" for journalists and people that come from non technological domains - still current and at the same time visionary for a video recorded in 2014 about Bitcoin.

"A small computer with mass memory and video-type display now costs $37,000"

And since $1 in 1965 is worth $7.27 today, that $37,000 is really $270,000.

Incidentally, I found https://jcmit.net/memoryprice.htm for the cost of memory over time. In 1965, memory cost $2.6m per megabyte. Today it is $0.003!

I love these old comp-sci papers.

Makes you wonder what amazing ideas are buried in them that where ahead of their time then but aren't now.

So much of what we use today came out of academia a couple of decades ago - I've made the joke before that if you want to see what the front-end folks will be doing next year look what was the hot research 25 years ago.

I see something of this in the plumbing of git. "pies of entries and lists? By patching techniques, of course. Variant entries and lists can take virtually no space, being modification data plus pointers to the original. When a modified version of a list or entry is created, the machine patches the original with the changes necessary to make the modified version"

dang, please add (1965) to the title. Ted really is a visionary.

I'm fascinated by these sort of ideas about how to structure data for personal archives, but most of the stuff I've read about it is quite old. Are there any recent innovations or ideas in this area or has everything basically been explored?

Any paper with an Edward Gorey reference gets my vote.

Ok, so that's how an emacs buffer works.