Bill and Ted's Most Excellent Adventures
Bill Atkinson and Ted Nelson dept.
From the Saturday June 7 New York Times
The hyperlink above leads to the obituary of Bill Atkinson of one of the most significant pioneers in the history of the personal computer. While I never knew Atkinson personally his innovations in the art of computer User Interface Design contributed mightily to the foundation that all of us as writers, visual artists, musicians or creatives stand upon.
Standing on the shoulders of other tech visionaries including Doug Englebart, Steve Jobs, and a host of others, Atkinson coded his way into history as the guy who was part of the team that coded the graphical heart of Macintosh personal computers establishing it as truly a tool for ‘the rest of us.’
In the late 1970’s I became fascinated by the computer. This new “thinking machine” with it’s capacity to turn thoughts into words, images and sounds was, in fact, a mind blower… Or maybe a mind expander…or maybe a ‘bicycle for the mind.’
It was all that and more. Maybe because of my own father’s nerdy command of radio and auto tech of the 40’s and 50’s, I developed an appreciation for what was happening at the frontier of electrical engineering. When Jobs and Woz developed the Apple ][ computer some of us in 1970’s Des Moines instantly saw the potential. My friends and fellow Drake students Richard Skeie and Don Brown (no relation) really got it and developed insanely great software for the Apple ][ and later the Macintosh.
The incredibly high quality education we all received as public school students in Des Moines prepared Richard and Don to be creatively curious enough to believe that they too could get in on the action and boy did they ever. The story of CE (Computer Emporium) software is a rich vein to explore but today I pay homage to the California guys who developed both the concepts and the code to literally change the world.
While it was music that pulled me from Des Moines to the San Francisco Bay Area in 1987 (thanks Teja) it was my connection to the Mac which brought me into close proximity with an entire universe of other innovators.
As fascinated as I was with the Commodore 64, Apple ][ and later the Macintosh, I was not destined to be a computer programmer. The advanced mathematics skills needed to be a coder were, to put it politely, way beyond my conceptual understanding. (I flamed out of Algebra and Geometry) I was however blessed with superpowers of imagination and, of course, journalism and writing in general.
I could intellectually conceive of some of programming concepts: The “If-Then” construct i.e. If (this particular condition is present) Then (do this action) was easy to understand. Unfortunately I never made it to the point where I understood Stack Registers, ‘machine language’ or other common tools of the computer programmer.
Thanks to William Dana Atkinson, and two other visionaries who were mentioned in the NYT story above, I didn’t need to. Doug Englebart and conceptualist Ted Nelson both made the leap from concept to code, creating a framework necessary for “the rest of us” to do so.
Theodore Holm Nelson, mentioned in the NYT story, was not a programmer either but more important than coding in that period was conceptual vision. The ability to envision what was possible in this new environment of digital electronics, (now freed from the clutches of the military/Insurance complex).
As a Jazz-Artist-In-Residence beginning in 1980 I traveled the U.S. spreading the gospel of Charlie Parker, Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong and other sonic innovators. I visited K-12 classrooms and college music departments describing the “code” of II-V-I progressions, tri-tone substitution and the time-shifting necessary to produce the sonic phenomenon called ‘swing’. Now That was a code I could relate to (Thanks again Dad..)
Getting these concepts across to non-players was a joyous challenge but a challenge nonetheless…..until the personal computer came on the scene with its graphical, auditory and textual features. I called my 1984 Macintosh 512k “the everything box” because of the aforementioned visual and audio capabilities all made useable because of Atkinson’s ability to code his way from conceptual-to-actual. Atkinson, Jobs and others were influenced at what they had seen at PARC creating tools to bend the computers power to our will as (non-programmer) users.
I met my dear friend Ted Nelson in 1990 at The Mac Garden, Marin County’s first All-Macintosh computer store in San Rafael. I was employed as a consultant and sales guy by the late Chet Zdrowski.
Ted Nelson was the first non-programmer “engineer” that I’d ever met. A “nerd of the mind” Ted was the “missing link” between the philosophical and the code. Programmers, as talented as they obviously were, really needed a deeper knowledge of philosophy and other ‘liberal arts’ tools to conceive of how the computer could escape the mundane “bean counting’ aspects and move to something more akin to a cross-disciplinary “bicycle for the mind.”
From Wikipedia: In 1965, Nelson presented the paper "Complex Information Processing: A File Structure for the Complex, the Changing, and the Indeterminate" at the ACM National Conference, in which he coined the term "hypertext".[2]
Using the mind of an ethical philosopher Ted foresaw a system that we now mundanely call linking. Those light blue-colored words that offer us a path into the “mind of the web.” Simply by clicking those links we were connecting to sources somewhere out there in the ever-expanding universe of digital file drawers. Ted and I struck up a friendship in 1990 that survives to this day.
Both Bill Atkinson and Ted Nelson, who as far as I know never met, contributed mightily to the platform on which we all stand today. Computers, originally a tool for insurance companies and others for classifying massive information sets, were now set free to enable creativity far beyond mundane concerns. Above, I mentioned Nelson’s gift as an ethical philosopher. Let me expand on this idea:
Here we are today in 2025 with wonderfully powerful tools for acquisition of information. In and of itself, a good thing. The problem, then and now, however is that the information being sought may have been created by someone else. Someone who’s blood, sweat and laboratory time had been poured into producing and presenting the information that we may, ahem….borrow or repurpose.
In the academy, it’s called attribution. You’re supposed to acknowledge (and, more importantly, compensate those whose information you access.
Theodore Holm Nelson’s real conceptual gift was based on the idea of the Bi-directional link. His version of digital morality was dependent on an Internet which would automatically “understand” who linked to whom and, more importantly, (a) how much information was supplied, (b) the ownership of the information and (c) a compensation structure for the information being linked to. (A process perfectly reasonable within the context of ethical academic publishing pursuits.) As Ted wrote in his seminal 1989 opus Literary Machines…
The problem however was that the commercial web (circa 1990’s) was inhabited by digital settler-colonialists (think napster) that saw information as something to be exploited with little or no thought to the ownership rights to the information they sought to acquire for their own purposes. It seemed as the rules of ownership did not apply in this new world of digitized reality. Whether music, text, scientific writing or images and video, if you could acquire it via a computer network, you were seemingly absolved of thinking about who was the original owner, author, composer or producer. It’s as if the ‘net was a virtual candy store which you could stroll into and grab whatever you wanted. Again, from Nelson’s Literary Machines…..
Ted Nelson sought to solve the ownership/compensation problem with the Bi-directional link. In theory it’s kind of a no-brainer. However in the heady, go-go days of the Internet the weird mantra “information should be free” took hold and….well…..here we are.
Ask Metallica, ask book publishers, motion picture producers or any creator about what this has meant to the livelihoods of those who seek to make a living as content creators.
So, the computer giveth and the computer taketh away. Our wonderful brains can conceive of great things but in the same moment, something great can bring about something exploitive and horrifying.
Nelson’s Quixotian effort at building a digital honor system was however doomed to fail because the well-funded pirate disruptors (looking at you YouTube) were able to influence (somewhat clueless) lawmakers of the 1990’s to indemnify (shield) them from the legal consequences of the actions that made them rich off the data that was provided to them for free. (We see you too FaceBook)
Next time you point-and-click your way to your next creative effort, think first of Bill Atkinson (and the giants on whose shoulders he stood) but also give a thought to my friend Theodore Holm Nelson who sought to give us creators a system which offers a fair, documented system of credit and compensation. Substack is to be congratulated for creating a system which, at least in theory, allows us to give/receive credit and compensation where it is due.
A note before I go….
Our “den mother” Julie Gammack has worked tirelessly to give us all a place to read, listen and dig on each others talents and gifts. Last year was my first Okoboji Writers and Songwriters Retreat at Lake Okoboji. It was a virtually a life changing event for me.
If you enjoy my work here, you’ll be bowled over at the depth of talent, heart and sheer volume of great writers, musicians, journalists, storytellers and more. Please consider attending the Iowa Writers and Songwriters Retreat at Iowa’s Premier summer vacation spot on beautiful Lake Okoboji. Like everything IWC, YOUR participation and contributions are what makes the wheels turn. Please consider registering for the 2025 version of the best damn Iowa experience that you can have with your clothes on.
Please take a look at the list Julie has compiled on Substack (link below). It includes all workshops, speakers, and scholarship recipients. To my readers and listeners: Forward it to anyone you think might be a good fit.
If each of you persuades just two people to enroll, We can all rest a little easier knowing that the show will go on.
So please—send this far and wide. Pretty please?
Let’s change some lives. Again.
I was a chem major and back in the day, all chemical instrumentation was by graphs and knowing what caused the peaks and dips. It was tough. The theory that one day these instruments, larger than a tesla truck could one day be able to just tell what the compound was. I even took a class in punch cards. My first teaching gig was in Williamsburg,IA. They just got a dedicated phone line to the big computer in Cedar Rapids over at Collins Radio. I got permission to use the Dec Writer which was a typewriter hooked up to this modem and more frequently as not, half way through writing a program, I'd look up and see that the modem had disconnected from the server and what I had done, was lost. I learned to frequently back up. I used it for the science and athletic medicine inventory. Later I graduated to a TRS80 with a stringy floppy. From there to the computer at Dial center at Drake. I was a lab instructor in chemistry and had access. Onward to running the server at the Register learning center and eventually to the world of my own Gateway, Dell and now iMac. It amuses me greatly when I am somewhere some salesman wants to impress me with his computer facts, and I interupt him, saying, "You ever use a Dec Writer?" Stops them cold . The chemistry instrumentation is now smaller than a laser printer and yes, prepare the sample, put it in the machine, and the magic begins, a graph and a solution as to which of the billions of compounds there are prints out. I don't use them anymore, retired from high school teaching, I do not code anymore, but still have the fun of asking, "Dec Writer? Trs80?"
Well, yeah. Ownership. Thanks for reminding us about the world before thieves ruled it.