Mimix is an invention that will transform how we work, how we study, and how we share information.

The ending of WWII changed everything for our country. It brought great prosperity but it left us with the tools to destroy ourselves. A brilliant scientist of the day named Vannevar (vuh-NEE-ver) Bush wrote that we needed something to help us “think better.” His answer was a machine called a memex. It would have been enormous and expensive and was never completed. But the dream is still with us.

Today, I’m going to share how our Mimix software will help people think better with new technology we’re creating. Our company’s name and slogan are inspired by his pioneering work.

You can’t watch the news today without hearing about artificial intelligence. It’s in everything from washing machines to the space program. But AI is missing from two things we do every day – reading and writing.

Now when I say “AI for written documents,” you may be thinking of spelling correction and stuff like that. Those tools are great, but they don’t help you think better and they don’t help the next person get any more out of your writing than what you put in.

If there’s more to a washing machine than meets the eye, then there’s certainly more to writing. Mimix is the first AI program for reading, writing, and communicating with others.

Word processors are great, but they’re also stupid. I’ll give you an example.

How many moons does Jupiter have? Would you have guessed 79? I wouldn’t. You might say, “Well, Google it,” but even Google would lead you to the wrong answer because 12 of them are recent discoveries. Most documents Google can find won’t know that, and Google won’t help you if you get it wrong.

Besides, why should you have to go to Google as a separate act? That doesn’t seem very intelligent. Surely the correct information could come to you automatically, as you write. Can’t it? We say it can.

Word processors throw away most of the work you put into your writing. You say, “What do you mean, throw it away?” Think of the last time you wrote a report for work or school. How many hours of research did you put in? A lot more than the reader will ever see.

We do the reader a disservice when we throw work away. We’re making that person repeat what you already did! That’s missing intelligence. Can your final documents include the research you went through? We say they can.

Of course, academic papers have footnotes but those make your readers repeat your work, too. Why should they have to find the sources for themselves? We say this needs to change.

The tools we use for reading are no smarter than the word processor. Sure, you can click a link, but that’s you repeating work again.

Even the links are dumb. Should you have to read an entire book to see a quote in context? A link can’t take you to the exact facts the author mentioned. If you don’t scour the source material, you might come to the wrong conclusions or be mislead by someone who didn’t get the facts right.

Browsers and PDF viewers don’t know one piece of paper from the next. A browser can’t tell that you read 27 stories on the California wildfires and some of them contradict each other.

Today’s tools are forgetful. There’s no way “rewind” your work stream. Often we need to go back to a paragraph we read this morning. But Adobe Acrobat doesn’t know what you did this morning or two years ago.

These tools are missing the intelligence to relate facts together across documents and over time. Our disks and cloud storage folders are a mess. Can software better organize your work? We say it can.

A better term for reading and writing is research. Important writing demands that you do your homework. You postulate your ideas, check out what others have done, make notes, and write your own new material.

Today, these are all separate tasks with no relation to one another. Can a single program bring reading and writing together? We say it can. In fact, this was a key part of Bush’s original dream for the microfilm-based Memex machine.

We’ve come a long way since microfilm, but modern programs still make you use an awful lot of windows just to get a simple project done. The word processor can’t see that you’re quoting from a web browser. It doesn’t know if you’ve forgotten to include critical information that’s sitting just one window away.

We’re left to juggle multiple programs and documents in order to complete one goal: sharing our ideas with someone else.

Mimix radically changes the broken research model. First, it brings together reading and writing in the same program. More importantly, Mimix uses AI to make sense of what’s going on in your research.

Using a concept we call canonical data, Mimix verifies facts as you read and write. Obviously, many things are matters of opinion – but many more are not.

How many moons does Jupiter have? When was Walt Disney born? And who shot JFK? Mimix lets writers and readers choose their own canonical data sources and change them later, even in someone else’s writing.

If you were trying to answer “Who shot JFK?,” which sources would you choose as canonical?

Mimix can also see across your documents in linear time. It knows that two papers you wrote are related, even if you created one yesterday and one a year ago. It knows that two web pages are related in content even if they came from different websites.

Mimix not only saves the reader time, avoiding the task of organizing web bookmarks or fumbling through document folders hunting down that critical piece of information. It also surfaces new insights and facts that you or your readers might easily miss in a pile of unrelated papers.

Writing might be an unexciting business but it’s absolutely necessary. We rely on the written word for everything from our medical records to our laws. Errors and omissions in writing can keep you from getting a job – or cause a plane crash.

Census reports and investigation by the Wall Street Journal show that ⅔ of the population uses computer documents in their work. About ⅓ of them are the document creators and ⅔ are the consumers.

Students at all levels are writers, but most important writing starts at the university level. The US Department of Education says 20 million students are enrolled in universities.

The numbers in this slide are for the US alone, but the market is worldwide. Everywhere, every day, hundreds of millions of people need to create and consume factual written materials.

Written documents are a big business. They’ve created vast profits for Microsoft, Google, and Adobe. Each of these companies has grown to near monopoly status precisely because the written word is so important.

Losing your work is even worse, and this has led to the rise of cloud computing. Today, we expect our documents to be everywhere – even after we replace a broken smartphone, upgrade a computer, or travel for a meeting.

Any commercially viable solution for reading and writing must be fully cloud enabled and not rely on users to install software, fix bugs, or create backups.

When computers were first invented, the companies that built them included software for free. This was necessary to get anyone to buy the boxes. The program code behind that software was also available for users to inspect and modify. This is known today as open source.

In 1983 beginning with IBM, big software companies introduced a new model. Instead of source files they started shipping compiled or binary files that couldn’t be viewed or edited by humans. Most desktop software like Microsoft Word and mobile apps now fall in this category.

A backlash against closed source software began with the Linux operating system movement. Today, the trend has reversed with large companies demanding open source from their vendors. This allows customers to look for security holes, to edit the software to fit their needs, and to avoid vendor lock-in.

Open source is behind the largest software acquisition in history, IBM’s purchase of Linux vendor Red Hat.

IBM didn’t want Red Hat for Linux; they could get that for free. IBM bought Red Hat because supporting Linux users is a multi-billion dollar business today that can only grow in the future. If IBM can become the go-to brand for hosted, supported Linux, they might have a chance to save their stodgy business.

It’s a great irony that IBM dipped their toes in open source when they invented the PC. Legal PC clones led to the mass market adoption of Windows that we know today. What IBM failed to do last time around was to monetize that invention.

The things that make open source wonderful also make it terrible. It’s the biggest DIY project in history. Every bit of the open source world is DIY. That might be OK if you have a techie team behind you, but it doesn’t work in the consumer space. This is why we don’t see Linux on desktop machines. It’s just too much work to coordinate all the moving parts.

Enterprise users can grow their own systems, but they don’t like it. Ford wants to weld together cars, not code. These customers were the first to demand that someone package up open source tools for them. They want their software hosted, backed up, and fixed when it’s broken – all things that the free Linux community couldn’t provide. They want clear and easy-to-read documentation and they want someone to answer the phone when they call for support.

To satisfy these demands, The Mimix Company will provide a paid software suite with turnkey service for both enterprise and consumer customers.

I’m excited about what we’re doing at Mimix and I hope you are, too!

always, you’re invited to email me with your thoughts. I look forward to hearing from you.

– D

 

Ted Nelson’s Xanadu is one of the most important and most maligned ideas in computer history. Why has it held such sway after more than 50 years? Why isn’t there any working software for download or a GitHub community of devs? Is Xanadu so difficult to achieve that no one call pull it off, or are there other factors? These are questions I’ve attempted to answer for myself.

Truthfulness relies on an unchanging record of the past.

Gary Wolf’s 1995 investigation for Wired into what he called The Curse of Xanadu is the de facto online history, not only for its scathing criticisms of Nelson (which he later disputed in an open letter) but for the rich detail and fascinating revelations about the people and companies behind the project. Where else could you find out about Autodesk’s involvement and the $5M they spent on trying to achieve Nelson’s dream?

Certainly personal factors and generally being viewed as a crazy person are problems shared by all inventors and geniuses. If it were just Ted’s fault, others would have come forward and made Xanadu without him. A deeper analysis shows that there are technical and market reasons that keep Xanadu from being real. They fall roughly into four buckets:

1. Things that already exist
2. Things we don’t need
3. Things Xanadu proposed but didn’t deliver
4. Things Xanadu is missing

 

Where It All Started

Nelson’s books Computer Lib and Dream Machines, published as a single volume and bound together, are the geek’s version of Be Here Now by Ram Dass. The books are amazing and indescribable, remarkable for their breadth and freshness, completely unorganized, and impossible to navigate. These are the first hand accounts of a brilliant traveler to a new place, witnessed and narrated for us in stream-of-consciousness style. Ram Dass was also a former academic turned on by the new and drug-induced culture of the sixties, and like him, Nelson conveyed enough “key driver” ideas to have inspired generations since. By 1980 in Literary Machines, he had formalized the main goals of Xanadu into a list of 17 rules. Let’s see which of these buckets each rule falls in.

17 Rules of Xanadu

1. Every Xanadu server is uniquely and securely identified.
We could say that every device today can be uniquely identified by an IPv6 address, a MAC address, or a domain name. “Securely identified” is an interesting phrase, but blockchains like Bitcoin meet the requirement. This Xanadu rule goes in the “exists” category.

2. Every Xanadu server can be operated independently or in a network.
This is true of nearly all computers, so it exists.

3. Every user is uniquely and securely identified. This is the same as rule #1. With peer networking, there is no difference between servers and users. Already exists.

4. Every user can search, retrieve, create and store documents.
This one definitely exists.

5. Every document can consist of any number of parts each of which may be of any data type.
HMTL covers this requirement in an ugly way. I would not vote for HTML as the way to organize composite documents going forward, but it does exist.

6. Every document can contain links of any type including virtual copies (“transclusions”) to any other document in the system accessible to its owner.
This definitely does not exist yet and it’s the thing that seems to drive Ted crazy. We’ll get to why it doesn’t exist in a minute. It goes in the “proposed” category.

7. Links are visible and can be followed from all endpoints.
This is another aspect of Xanadu that’s only proposed and doesn’t exist. Really, it’s a feature of rule #6 in that once a document is transcluded in another, you can see and follow links both ways.

8. Permission to link to a document is explicitly granted by the act of publication.
This is the first example of a Xanadu feature we don’t need. A tool for readers and writers should not get involved in the concerns of platform or content providers.

9. Every document can contain a royalty mechanism at any desired degree of granularity to ensure payment on any portion accessed, including virtual copies (“transclusions”) of all or part of the document.
Again, we are messing where we shouldn’t be messing. This “feature” is only here to enable rule #15.

10. Every document is uniquely and securely identified.
This is a terrific idea and sorely needed. Enormous problems are caused by making humans take on the naming and management of documents. Is a blockchain answer the way to address this proposed idea?

11. Every document can have secure access controls.
It can be argued that we’ve claimed to have this forever but the current systems are all pretty bad. Today’s best solution to secure access is public key encryption like we see in blockchains, but losing a key has catastrophic results and will require better custodial and backup solutions in the future. I’m putting this in the “exists” bucket.

12. Every document can be rapidly searched, stored and retrieved without user knowledge of where it is physically stored.
This absolutely exists in many forms, the most obvious of which is Google. Of course, Ted is talking about a more personalized system of searching and saving documents that interest you, but the tech exists.

13. Every document is automatically moved to physical storage appropriate to its frequency of access from any given location.
This isn’t even a user feature, it’s housekeeping. Not needed. If sharding and redundant access to remote documents is required, solutions like IPFS are coming online to provide that.

14. Every document is automatically stored redundantly to maintain availability even in case of a disaster.
This is more housekeeping but definitely useful. Systems already exist to do this. Bitcoin is a great example of redundant storage of common data which is needed by many people.

15. Every Xanadu service provider can charge their users at any rate they choose for the storage, retrieval and publishing of documents.
Could this be the straw that broke the camel’s back? The requirement to turn Xanadu into a copyright management business certainly isn’t a user feature nor necessary technologically.

16. Every transaction is secure and auditable only by the parties to that transaction.
This is a terrific and important idea which is only now coming to fruition, especially with privacy-focused cryptocurrencies like Zcash. Although recent, it exists.

17. The Xanadu client–server communication protocol is an openly published standard. Third-party software development and integration is encouraged.
And strangely, here at the end, is a rule that was violated even before work began on the code. Perhaps Nelson didn’t believe enough in his publishing business model to allow anyone to see the software as it was being developed. This aspect of Xanadu was only proposed and not delivered.

The Missing Rules

I mentioned earlier that, in addition to what was proposed, Xanadu is missing some features that would help it attain commercial success today. Let’s examine them.

18. The system provides multiple views of the same data and makes it easy to switch between them.
This idea is from Douglas Engelbart and his NLS system. Xanadu was never shown with multiple views, such as slideshows, timelines, or outlines.

19. Text is stored without formatting.
This idea is discussed at length in Nelson’s papers and even mentioned in Computer Dreams, but it’s not on the Xanadu rule list. It should be. Today’s systems mix text, formatting, and data structure which makes it difficult to extract any of these later.

20. Metadata can be canonical.
This idea, which I expound upon in the Mimix whitepaper, addresses Nelson’s desire to have certain data or documents accepted as absolutes, such as the signed copy of the Declaration of Independence and its previous versions.

21. Data is atomic.
Another idea intrinsic to Xanadu but not revealed until later was that it was to hold all data in unalterable “atoms.” What appeared to be documents on screen, including your own writing, were merely atoms strung together. Ted described a complex system of altering data later and changing its address, which never took off.

22. Streams can be shared, disassembled, and re-used.
Although Ted’s papers refer to the idea of a set of Xanadu documents as a “stream,” he doesn’t develop the idea of how streams would be shared or utilized by others. These must be built-in to the system and offer abilities beyond today’s document or app sharing.

23. Your data is kept private.
End-to-end encryption is necessary today for many reasons. Only you should have access to the materials you read and write inside Xanadu or its successor.

Sorting It Out

If we rearrange the rules into the four buckets: Exists, Unnecessary, Missing, and Proposed, we get something like this:

A quick glance at this diagram shows that much of what’s needed to create Xanadu already exists or can be cobbled together from existing pieces by using API’s. An interesting side-effect of diagramming things this way is that it makes clear what was proposed but not delivered. The first two (#6 and #7) are the things that Ted talks about today in his YouTube videos.

Delivering on the Promise

If half of the problem has already been solved (or doesn’t need to be), we are left asking the question, “How difficult are the remaining pieces?” Judging by what’s left of the original 17 rules, I would say, “Achievable.” The last rule, open source, we can dispatch by simply starting from that point. Mimix or any worthy successor to Xanadu must be open source.

The Holy Grail of Xanadu was transclusion, the idea of including part of one document inside another and being able to refer back-and-forth between them. We’ve actually had transclusion for some time. Microsoft delivered it in their OLE object linking and embedding technology and HP went so far as to ship an entire version of Windows, called HP NewWave, based around transclusion of atomic objects. Today you can create a logo in Adobe Illustrator, transclude it in a Photoshop document, then double-click it from Photoshop to edit the original in Illustrator. But what Ted is referring to is transclusion while reading others’ works and writing your own. This, we do not have.

It turns out, that kind of transclusion is actually easy. It requires two things which were missing from Nelson’s proposal. The first is massive storage. It simply wasn’t possible to keep thousands of books or papers on the personal computers of the day, or even on your personal account on a university or corporate computer. Instead, Ted thought we should link to copies of the same data. That made sense in the days when schools and institutions had all the computing power and storage, but that’s not the case today. You can buy an external terabyte drive on Amazon for $50. Cloud storage is cheap, too.

Nelson liked to use the example of the Declaration of Independence, and so do I. While recognizing that documents would need to be copied and virtualized, he held to the idea that links would be to the original document or its alias. He also suggested that all links would be bidirectional, meaning that any elementary school child who quoted the Declaration of Independence could expect to have his or her paper linked back from the original document. That’s simply preposterous. Imagine the huge numbers of scientific papers which all refer to facts in the periodic table. Should visiting that table produce links to all of them? Balderdash!

If we think of transcluding a document from our own local storage rather than from some remote, shared location, we can greatly simplify the problem and produce a system that actually works for the user. Instead of linking to a remote copy of the Declaration controlled by someone else (or a copy of a copy), why not just keep a copy in your own local storage? If it comes from a trustworthy source, you can rely on it going forward. Taking the Declaration from the Library of Congress is a 100% reliable source. In Mimix, we call this canonical metadata. It’s not necessary for you to refer back to the original Declaration, just pull up your own (canonical) copy which is known to be correct. As I’m writing now, I’m referring to my own saved versions of all these documents I’ve mentioned.

With multiple terabytes of personal storage, even the most prolific author or researcher could have his or her own copy of every document he or she ever examined, along with all the user’s annotations. The periodic table (or a book about the history of France) isn’t going to change after you download it, and if it does, that’s easy for software to find and fix. You would still have your old copy, of course.

In working on my nuclear book, I’ve amassed a collection of over 250,000 pages of PDFs along with my highlighting and notes inside each. There’s no software I’ve found that’s really up to the job, but the terrific and free Docear (rhymes with “dog ear” as one would do to a book) is a good place to start. Its interface is tedious and not well integrated with a writing environment. It also doesn’t make any connections for me between my data and my writing, nor offer any alternative views. But it does let me keep my notes together with the original sources they came from and let me find either of these when I need to.

Keeping a copy of every document you read in your own personal storage and accessing them with the same tool that you use for your own writing opens the gateway to a true Xanadu-style system. Now, if we draw links between our writing and the documents we read, it’s easy for the system to retrieve the referenced files and show them on the screen at the same time — even with the graphical links that Nelson preferred. After all, we have both documents on our own disk! In this environment, it makes to sense to show links from every document as well as to it. In other words, every paper that you read or write about the Declaration of Independence should be linked from your view of that original document, but not from every else’s in the entire world.

The storage issues notwithstanding, I think Nelson skipped over the idea of local copies because he was trying to build a business around publishing and copyright management. The idea of every user having his or own copy of a document would be anathema to such a system. All three unnecessary features of Xanadu hinged on the publishing business model. In a last ditch effort to commercialize Xanadu after Autodesk pulled out, the owners approached Kinko’s (now known as FedEx Office) with a copyright and document management system. Even for them, it was unclear who would get paid and how. The entire idea of your writing and research tool being bound-up with a publisher and his royalties is simply awful. This, at the end of the day, is probably why Xanadu failed.

Building the Missing Pieces

If the missing pieces I’ve described are truly missing in that no deployed system exists which offers them, then we have something to aim for. If we can build a program that incorporates all of the existing aspects, skips the unnecessary ones, delivers on the unfulfilled promises, and fills in the holes in the original idea — then we can have a salable product! LOL.

We’ve already seen a brute-force way to include the existing technologies. A variety of frameworks, application programming interfaces, and services can cover everything in green on our chart. It would be preferable to build a new system which incorporates open source code for these features rather than relying on outside providers to continue to offer them. The biggest unfulfilled promise of Xanadu was transclusion and we’ve already seen how that can be done by simply reading and writing with a tool that keeps copies of what you’re doing. All that’s left are the orange items on our chart.

Multiple Views

We work with multiple views of data every day, but the process is messy and mostly manual. We often need to move data from something that looks like a list to something that looks like an email, a chart, or a slideshow. Today’s tools offer a million ways to present data but it’s still surprisingly difficult to move the same information around into different views.

Douglas Engelbart’s revolutionary NLS system had this idea built-in from the start, in 1968. Tragically, NLS was almost impossible to use. If anything, it offered the antithesis of a user interface and died commercially after a series of acquisitions and mergers. Along the way, we lost the idea of a consolidated system for multiple views.

Mimix proposes to re-frame the current document paradigm into a system of data called atoms and ancillary data about your data called metadata. If you are writing about Gaudí, the factual sources you consult would be metadata. So would any formatting you applied. Together, these are Mimix views.

Format-Free Text

I’ve mentioned formatting as an example of metadata because it needs to be separated from the writing itself. Nelson has complained that today’s WordStar and SGML-inspired systems are messing up the real data we’re after, and he’s absolutely right. Mimix does not allow the co-mingling of data and formatting and these aspects are formalized into the design. Formatting is just another kind of Mimix metadata which can be applied or removed, both of which are recorded in the stream.

Canonical Metadata

Nelson put a great emphasis on the idea of referencing the “one true version” of a document (or its copy or alias), but he didn’t address how that truthfulness would be determined. This is a real problem which hasn’t been addressed in any software that I know of. Taking a simple example, a college student might write a paper for music class without being exposed to such divergent concepts as diatonic set theory or serial music. “Google it,” we might reply today. But this is an artifact of the library card catalog, itself an artifact of the printing press. Instead of telling children “Let’s go to the library,” we tell them to go to Google. This is something of an improvement but we’re not home yet.

Much of the data that children would find in a library could be called canonical in computer terms, or simply “correct.” Everyone who inquires as to the distance to the Sun should receive the same answer. In this world of fake news and unreliable sources, it is more important than ever to declare and classify data according to its authenticity and sources. A more complex example is, “Who shot JFK?” What sources would you choose as canon? These are decisions best left to each individual author, but his or her choices should be clear not only to the writer but also to readers. In a Mimix stream, the author’s canonical sources are available to inspect and alter.

Atomicity

Truthfulness relies on an unchanging record of the past. Although facts and opinions change, our interactions with them in the past were based on our knowledge then. Our actions in the future must be based on the future values. The values that some data had yesterday were the basis of all of yesterday’s decisions and should not be erased. When changes are needed, we can simply record a new atom of data with the new values.

Nelson referred to this idea in his paper on the Xanalogical Structure of Documents, but the proposed method of accessing and “updating” these atoms was unnecessarily complex. Using the mass storage now available to us, we can simply snapshot every piece of data as it comes in and also snapshot every change to it. By replaying our snapshots, we could see where the data started and how it had changed.

Whenever there are long streams of documents and you need to only access a small part, some kind of addressing system is necessary. Two programmers working for Nelson came up with a system called tumblers based on the transfinite numbers they had studied in college. The method relied on literal rows, columns, and character counts to identify chunks of text, making it fragile and unreliable after text was changed.

Since the 1950’s, we’ve had regular expressions. I’ll be the first to admit that I hate them, but they do work. Rather than trying to specify the literal character positions of the data we want, regular expressions let us find the text we need syntactically. To grab the Preamble from the Constitution, I only need to write:

/we the people(.*)america./gi

Once I’ve referred to that piece of the original text, I could format it any way I like, display it on a slide, or quote it in the Schoolhouse Rock video that still rings in my mind. Selecting just the first letter and applying special formatting like a drop-cap is easy with regular expressions, too.

The Constitution isn’t changing anytime soon, but how does the concept of atomicity apply to your own writing which might change frequently? Let’s take two very different use cases. A screenwriter needs to create characters and then draw from many resources to develop a narrative around that character. There are sure to be numerous references, notes, illustrations, etc. and these will grow and evolve over time. But keeping them atomic lets the author go back and see the original data from which the notes were derived. If some material had been deleted, it would be impossible to refer to it going forward but easy to access it going backward.

A doctor needs to keep copious notes on his or her patients as well as a variety of canonical documents such as lab tests or radiology studies. Every prescription written must be maintained. There is some list of what drugs the patient is on right now versus all the drugs he or she has ever been prescribed. Today, this is mostly in paper files. In Mimix, the patient is an atom and all of these ancillary data are applied to that atom over time. The metadata itself is atoms, too. In other words, everything known about Vioxx at the time it was prescribed to patients is quite different from what is known now.

Streamsharing

Sharing today is second nature and we have all kind of systems for sharing screens, apps, and they content they produce. Unfortunately, none of these systems makes it easy to do anything useful with the data after it’s shared. These are siloed applications in computer terms with data only moving up and down in the same system but not outside it. A corporate webinar or conference keynote makes a great example. Some useful content might be displayed by the presenters but it’s trapped in the video recording and can’t be extracted. At best, the audience gets a list of links they can click later. Most of the valuable information in the content stream is lost unless the viewer keeps separate notes.

Mimix introduces the idea of streamsharing, giving others a functional copy of your own research from which they can extract data, metadata, and annotations or add their own. More properly, Mimix recreates this idea from the original work of Vannevar Bush who in 1945 proposed a stream recording system called Memex based on microfilm. A Memex user who received a reel of film would be able to extract any frames, rearrange them, print them, delete some, and compile the whole thing onto a new spool. The medium carrying the information was the information itself, giving the recipient the same powers as the author.

My Mimix stream recording idea differs in several ways from app or document sharing. First of all, once shared, the stream belongs to the recipient who retains all its contents. Secondly, the stream is live and can not only be played linearly like a video but also accessed for its atoms and metadata. The new user can extract or discard any part of the stream he wishes, a concept not possible with today’s software. Because Mimix data is not bound up in documents or presentation formats, the system can show the stream recipient a summary of everything inside it and allow that person to choose what he or she wants to extract.

In addition to selectively importing the stream, a recipient is free to rewind and make changes to a “past” view of the stream’s contents. The audience member or potential new inventor could discard some part of the stream’s metadata halfway through and substitute new data of his own, changing the views thereafter. Scientific researchers could use this feature to look through old papers with the lens of new information, for example.

A Mimix stream naturally incorporates all the documents referenced in its metadata, so a Shakespeare commentary stream would include the full text of all the plays mentioned as well as any other reference sources the author consulted. The massive storage of today’s systems makes it possible and desirable for each reader and writer to have a full digital library which he or she can annotate and reference going forward.

Encryption

I leave for last the topic that came first in the history of computing and that is encryption. Your favorite news source is full of stories about why we need encryption, from corporate data breaches to government hacks and rampant surveillance. The earliest computers didn’t worry much about encryption for several reasons. Many were released before strong encryption techniques were popularized. Home computers didn’t seem to need encryption (back then) and they didn’t have the processors or storage to provide it anyway. Corporate and university computers were managed by the institutions that owned them and users didn’t worry about how to protect the data.

Things have changed drastically since then. The prevailing idea around security is, “Be afraid. Be very afraid.” Any reasonable successor to Xanadu (or any non-trivial software, really) should provide end-to-end encryption as a built-in and non-optional feature. In a system like this, the Mimix software would only store “garbage data,” of no use to anyone without your private key to decrypt it. When you share your streams with others, a different set of garbage data is sent to them which only they can decrypt. When your data is backed up in the cloud or elsewhere, only the garbage data is recorded, requiring your key to decrypt it later.

As mentioned earlier, this kind of public/private key encryption system comes with a risk. If you can’t decrypt your data, neither can anyone else. This reinforces the need for key backup systems and custodial oversight, such as making sure a trusted friend or associate has your key.

Can We Get to Xanadu?

I think we can. If we incorporate the technologies that already exist and build the missing pieces, I see no technical barriers to its completion. As for the market, it’s huge. Like word processors and spreadsheets which were once expensive and limited to big business owners, a tool like Mimix which is a hit with early adopters (education, scientific, medical, creative) can evolve into a version for everyone.

Are you excited about the Mimix ideas? I am, and I’d love to hear your thoughts. Check out the whitepaper and write me anytime at david@mimix.io. And thanks for reading!

— D
Key West, Florida
August 26, 2018

I’m pretty sure I was born a geek. I’ve always been interested in the latest technology, forever holding out hope that tomorrow’s inventions would make the world better than it is today. At the very least, maybe technology could one day make using technology itself easier. Alas, that has not been the case.

Not long ago, I did a brief stint as a part time employee at my local Sprint store. That will need to be its own blog post. Perhaps if I’m feeling ambitious I could aim for something akin to Nickel and Dimed by fellow Key West author Barbara Ehrenreich. Anyway, I digress. While working at the Sprint store I got to see on a daily basis how Apple’s most advanced and consumer-friendly software (in the form of iOS) was interpreted by real people in the real world. It’s surely different than what Apple imagines.

It’s crazy to think that Apple is the world’s first trillion dollar company. It was started in Steve Jobs’s garage and the original Apple I was designed and hand built by his buddy Steve Wozniak. The other Steve left the company in the early 80’s. Though never giving it as his reason for leaving, Wozniak did say that after having a child he realized that technology wasn’t going to be the thing that saved mankind.

In those early days of personal computing, regular people could not only program their computers, it was expected of them! It was assumed that the computer owner would be in complete control of his machine. Of course, this would entail a learning curve, but the rewards were huge. Any college student could write whatever software he wished, save it on a disk, and sell it. An enterprising young man named Bill Gates got his start doing just that. It was as easy as putting a disk in the mail.

One of the most important programs for early computers was Hypercard by Bill Atkinson. It was revolutionary for two reasons. First, it let normal people design software with a modern graphical user interface based on stacks of cards. Secondly, it shipped free with every Macintosh at the insistence of its inventor who gave the product to Apple only if they agreed to that condition. Hypercard was dreamed up during an LSD trip and was clearly something designed around the idea of a “user-centered computer.” Apple had to make it go away, and they did. Hypercard would have hurt their applications software business too much, so the company thought. The company never really had an applications software business to worry about and in screwing-up Hypercard they missed out on the chance to define the web browser, which is what it would have become.

The people like Steve Jobs who made those decisions put an end to the ecosystem that made them rich. They took away the structure that they used to gain their power, transferring all of the creative and financial output of the old systems to themselves. Today, any app that you can think of will require the approval of one or more of the four big tech players: Apple, Google, Facebook, and Amazon. You will have to write your software using tools and languages they approve of. You may not discover or extend any device or platform features. In fact, quite the opposite. You’ll be constrained by your tech “partner” in the set of tools and features you can use. In this world, not only do you not own your software (or device), neither does the end user. Apple or Google will decide what code you can write and how it might interact with your device.

On one hand, this sounds terrific. In a nerdy fever dream, we could be done with “bad” software and security problems. We’d never have to worry about updates or compatibility. Our software stuff would just work because somebody big was taking care of it. Well, guess what? All of this totalitarian control over your software and devices didn’t deliver on any of those promises. It actually made them worse. We spend more time today on updates, security, compatibility, and learning to use our tools than people did when they were running WordStar on a CP/M machine in 1982.

And not only are your software and devices controlled by the big guys, your content is, too. Even content you create. How is it possible that Google or Amazon should decide what files you can own and where you put them? Yet every day, millions of people lose access to their own work because of these platforms and systems. They made the mistake of writing something under the “wrong” account. Or they saved their contacts in a different “app.” It’s as though buying a Joni Mitchell 8-track gave her record company the right to open your front door and rifle through your music collection, taking what they please. And you better not forget your Joni Mitchell password or we might not ever let you hear her again!

I’m just old school enough to still subscribe to the idea that you own your stuff. I also cling to the fantasy that every company should try to make something better than the next guy. In the old days, we sold software because it was good. It did something people wanted and were willing to pay for. The first spreadsheet, Dan Bricklin’s Visicalc, was so great that people bought computers just get their hands on it. It was the world’s first “killer app.” Are there any killer apps today? No. No one gives a shit about animoji. Today, you are the product and software and devices are forced on you piecemeal in order to sell you to advertisers, politicians, and governments.

The foxes are running the hen house. Some will say it was always this way. The new book Surveillance Valley by Jasha Levine posits that the entire internet was nothing more than a psyops and surveillance tool from the start. While doing research for the Mimix whitepaper, I read several of the manuals and papers for Douglas Engelbart’s NLS, an important and early precursor to almost all of today’s modern computing concepts. Every document acknowledges its Army or Defense Department funding, dutifully quoting the contract numbers. NLS was also an early use for ARPANET, the DoD project which became the internet.

Before that, IBM got its start in helping the government compute ballistics trajectories and using their new punch card machines to count Nazi concentration camp prisoners. Much later, while I was there, the company defended its support of the South African government with its intentionally racist apartheid policies that resulted in incalculable human suffering. The whole history of computing, really, is traceable to military and government atrocities. Maybe they just needed it more than “The Rest of Us.”

These and countless other examples aside, I’m still a believer in digital democracy. Software is like castles in the sky. Really, we can build anything in software — including things its inventors didn’t want. This is at the core of hacking, maximizing what can be done with software and hardware. Pioneers will always find a way to push the tools and tech in a new direction in order to work around the established order. I do think that Jobs and Wozniak had that in mind, at least at the start. Many other people have done serious and important work in making computers positive tools for society. A personal favorite of mine is Seymour Papert, an educator and inventor of the LOGO programming language. He believed that learning to program could help children to think better, giving society real hope for the future. Papert’s work and writing provided a computer epiphany for me in my own explorations with LOGO. It was he who made me realize that software was “castles in the sky” without limits. Papert was South African.

Microsoft, a company which grew up in an open and competitive environment with thousands of small players, came to dominate the business computer landscape and leave only a handful. But you can only drink so much of your own medicine. Today, no one seriously thinks of Microsoft as a long term factor in the computer industry. They’ve stopped innovating. Today, Microsoft aligns itself with Linux, with open source software, and even with gaming platforms like Unity that they didn’t invent. If they hadn’t, the company would be half its size already. People outside the Microsoft philosophy created other ways of doing things and those ways might win.

Can software return to some of its former values of user-centered control and openness? We’ve seen the world’s biggest companies exploit open source software to make billions without having to pay anyone for it, yet it’s the paid products of those companies that most people buy rather than the open source tools themselves. It’s an “embrace and extinguish” approach. But if techno monstrosities can use open source software to create upheaval, so can anyone else.

One area of tech where companies have embraced their retro values is in electronic music. My favorite synth company, Roland, has a full line of vintage synths based on modern technology, complete with their knobs and buttons and noticeably lacking screens or “software.” You can even go back to plug-out synths with real cables if you’d like and still use your modern DAW. Roland has also begun partnering with other companies on circuit design and re-creation. You see, unlike Apple, Roland can’t lock you into an ecosystem. Moving to another synth is as easy as putting your hands on the keys. Music instruments have to earn the player’s business because they have to be loved.

Does anyone love software anymore? I love retrocomputing, the use of old systems for entertainment. Of course, nostalgia has a lot to do with it. But I play with emulators for many machines I never used in real life. They’re so blissfully free of updates, internet connections, and other modern computer baggage that you can actually do something entertaining with them. You can program them. And, of course, you can add all that modern stuff to them if you want to. In 2018, you can program a Wang 700 calculator by loading software from a web address.

Don’t get me wrong, I like modern programming, too. Angular is terrific and JavaScript is a much more sophisticated language than most people give it credit for. But the most basic framework for an Angular app still requires a huge amount of overhead, not to mention signing up for the aforementioned Surveillance Society. I long for the days when we could type 10 PRINT “HELLO WORLD.”

You know what? In Lisp, you still can, though you’d write ‘(HELLO WORLD.) in that language. I think that if we’re going to go back to our retrocomputing values we need to start there, with a self-contained machine that’s immediately responsive to simple commands. It should be insulated from the outside world (not dependent on it), yet able to draw resources from there when the user chooses.

One thing early computing pioneers didn’t address was encryption, an interesting oversight since it is literally the foundation of all modern computing in the form of Alan Turing’s work and inventions. Could it be they didn’t want the plebiscite to have privacy? In any case, a modern computing system focused on the user would need to have end-to-end encryption. In other words, only “garbage data” would be stored on the system itself, requiring a key to unscramble it into something that could be read or changed.

The use of encryption to protect data from unwanted spying or changes is part of the blockchain technology that powers Bitcoin. Bitcoin also relies on a network of peers to provide a big set of backups, a quality that could be useful to anyone for saving his own work. Today’s systems don’t have enough speed or storage to shard everyone’s files and replicate them in a distributed way. But the demands of software always exceed the capacity of hardware and those systems will be developed.

I can’t bring up “future computing” without mentioning Magic Leap, who this week released the Creator Edition of its augmented reality headset. The system projects 3D digital objects and characters into your eyes in a way that makes them appear to be in real space. Sort of. Magic Leap founder Rony Abovitz is convinced that his system is how we’ll want to interact with computers in the future. And Samsung thinks you want to talk to your washing machine. I’m not so sure.

It seems to me that people might prefer that a future computer act more like one from the past while retaining some important great inventions from today. The internet has to be there, along with encryption. We need modern devices and user interfaces. But underneath that we need privacy, reliability, simplicity, and control. We need comprehension and systems tailored to our needs, not those of platform providers.

If these ideas interest you, I invite you to read the whitepaper and contact me with your thoughts.

Thanks in advance,
— D