zz: fwd: ZZ fan letter from Australia

[Ted Nelson <ted@xxxxxxxxxx>]

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Date: Mon, 18 Dec 2000 01:18:39 +1300
To: ted@xxxxxxxxxx
From: Andrew McClure <andrew@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: ZigZag

Dear Ted,

Having just read an article in the Economist ( Dec, 9, 2000 ) on your work
with Xanadu and ZigZag, and subsequently but briefly having reviewed the
ZigZag and GZigZag web sites, I'd just like to drop you a quick note.

I have been programming computers for over 10 years, about 6 of which
professionally. Having cut my teeth on a Mac 512k whilst supposedly doing
an English degree, I always considered myself a reasonable if not
exceptional coder. Today, unfortunately perhaps, I am now involved in
Business Development - having reached a level of cynicism towards business
computing that was decidedly unhealthy.

Anyway, for sometime now, in moments of leisure or humdrum activity, I have
been struggling with the notion of representation. How can one effectively
categorise, store, link, and rapidly retrieve objects such as people,
places, quotes, ideas, events, references - in a manner that is both
intuitive and non-linear? I even visualised some Java based software to
develop what in effect has already been developed under the name GZigZag -
you can imagine my surprise!

Now while my hubris as a programmer may have to take a little dent to think
that this has all already been thought of and even implemented, I'd just
like to let you know how excited I am by the work that has been, and is
being accomplished, and the potential that it holds. 

Finally we might start to see personal, organisational, even international
knowledge management tools that actually work like people think! 

Just as an aside, the sooner that something like this can be integrated
with a handheld combination device such as a WAP enabled, personal
organiser come mobile phone ( ideally with scanning, OCR, and voice
recognition capability ) the better - the next best thing to a bionic brain
implant!

Now what was that last idea I just had ....???  (:

All the best

Andrew

_____________________________________
Andrew McClure <andrew@xxxxxxxxxxx>
URL		http://www.amac.com.au/
Phone 	+64 4 479 2002
Mobile	+64 21 671 117
_____________________________________


_________________________________________
Theodor Holm Nelson              
Project Professor, Keio University SFC Campus, Fujisawa, Japan
Visiting Professor, University of Southampton, England
 ?  e-mail: ted@xxxxxxxxxx   ?  world-wide fax 1/415/332-0136
 ?  http://www.sfc.keio.ac.jp/~ted/    ?  http://www.xanadu.net
 ? Coordinates in USA      Tel. 415/ 331-4422
  Project Xanadu, 3020 Bridgeway #295, Sausalito CA 94965
_________________________________________