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Posted Jul 12th 2011 9:01 A.M. by Brian Benchoff
John Ohno has been working on a zzstructure operating system written C since January. John realizes not many people know what a zzstructure is, so he posted a demo of his project.
John has also put all the code online.
A zzstructure is both a hypertext and operating system unlike anything we have today. You could say that when it was first conceived in 1960 it was 100 years ahead of its time. John‘s implementation of zzstructures operates on a 256-dimension grid, and functions a lot like a multidimensional forum thread. Although that’s a lot to wrap your head around, it can probably best be explained by Ted Nelson, the creator of zzstructures.
The zzstructure was an integral part of the first hypertext project, Project Xanadu, started by Ted Nelson in 1960. The idea behind Project Xanadu is a sea change from the current implementations of hypertext, but the project fell into a chasm of development hell lasting more than 20 years.
Wired did a story on The Curse of Xanadu in 1995, and to read about a wonderful idea – an information structure not based on the idea of paper – be supplanted by the web is just sad. The UI of John‘s build resembles the first implementation of Xanadu, but without the split-screen and dual-cursor design.
We’re really impressed with John‘s work, and even though he thinks it would be great for electronic organizers, we think a zzstructure implementation would be great for coding or development. We don’t see many software hacks but with something like this, it’s hard not to be impressed.
Originally posted at Hack-A-Day
John Ohno has been working on a zzstructure operating system written C since January. John realizes not many people know what a zzstructure is, so he posted a demo of his project.
John has also put all the code online.
A zzstructure is both a hypertext and operating system unlike anything we have today. You could say that when it was first conceived in 1960 it was 100 years ahead of its time. John‘s implementation of zzstructures operates on a 256-dimension grid, and functions a lot like a multidimensional forum thread. Although that’s a lot to wrap your head around, it can probably best be explained by Ted Nelson, the creator of zzstructures.
The zzstructure was an integral part of the first hypertext project, Project Xanadu, started by Ted Nelson in 1960. The idea behind Project Xanadu is a sea change from the current implementations of hypertext, but the project fell into a chasm of development hell lasting more than 20 years.
Wired did a story on The Curse of Xanadu in 1995, and to read about a wonderful idea – an information structure not based on the idea of paper – be supplanted by the web is just sad. The UI of John‘s build resembles the first implementation of Xanadu, but without the split-screen and dual-cursor design.
We’re really impressed with John‘s work, and even though he thinks it would be great for electronic organizers, we think a zzstructure implementation would be great for coding or development. We don’t see many software hacks but with something like this, it’s hard not to be impressed.
Originally posted at Hack-A-Day