Saturday, January 24, 1998

"Mail Starting 1/24/98".

My friend Marc Canter of Venue Media led the team that did the in-stadium software for the SuperBowl in San Diego tomorrow. Microsoft technology played a central role in their project.

In the 1970s, before ThinkTank, Ready, Framework, PC-Outline, MaxThink, Acta, MORE or Frontier, Doug Engelbart, the man who invented the mouse, worked on an outline-based workflow system called Augment, at a company called Tymshare. I remember reading about Engelbart's work in a book by Ted Nelson. Engelbart and Nelson are pillars of the software industry.

I wrote an article about Ted Nelson in June 1995.

Ted Nelson coined the term hypertext.

It's so cool that yesterday's article about Frontier 5 as an outliner got me in touch with people who are watching the history of this area. To people who use Frontier as a scripting system, the outline people are going to turn our heads around. Trust me on this one. They're a different breed. Very smart people.

I'm using my new Dell laptop to edit this site now. It's a beautiful machine, but the tracking pad is quirky, and the setup process was much more complicated than for a PowerBook. Why can't Microsoft and Dell work together to make this simpler?

SJ Merc: Netscape pulls back from Java.

W3C: XSL Website.

CNN poll on Microsoft anti-trust issues.