I’ve been watching Ted Nelson’s “Computers for Cynics” video series, an alternative view of the history of computing by one of the men who shaped it.

The best episode is “Hyperhistory”, on the history of Project Xanadu, Doug Engelbart’s “Mother of All Demos”, and the watered-down technologies that become our modern GUIs and the World Wide Web. I didn’t know that Project Xanadu was sponsored by John Walker at Autodesk in the late 1980s. Walker’s The Autodesk File is a fascinating account of that era.