In New York City, the Yiddish loanword mensch doesn’t just mean “man,” it means “a good person.” It means someone who does the right thing when nobody’s checking.

I think that Ted Nelson, coiner of the words “hypertext” and “hypermedia” in 1963, author of Computer Lib / Dream Machines (1974) clears that bar.

NB: I don’t know Nelson. So I’ll be making these observations based on public record about him. I’ll not be referring to him as “Ted Nelson” as I do “Sabrina Carpenter” as he has not endeavored to make himself the media product.

Cover photo: Ted Nelson presenting on Project Xanadu at The Tech Museum of Innovation, February 19, 2011. Photo by Daniel Gies, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

It was some time in about 2007, I’d guess when I was taking Latin under Jim Burleson at ACC in Austin.

We were picking apart some Latin sentence and finding the modifiers that bonded to the substantives and ensuring that their “(grammatical) gender, number, and person” were aligned. Somewhat offhandedly, Professor Burleson sketched out a horizontal line and started doing some sort of tree branching structure off of the line. Now, friends, I’ve never met a notation system that didn’t steal my eyeballs, so this was pretty amazing.

Somewhere around 2019 (!) I read this article: “How the Invention of Spreadsheet Software Unleashed Wall Street on the World” by Janet Burns. Judging by the date I recorded this article in my wiki, I think I must have encountered this during my funemployment after being laid off from WeWork. I had accepted my garden leave from them, had already accepted a job at Bloomberg and was enjoying some Neumann-financed time off.

Regardless, I’d never forgotten some brilliant lines and quotes from it and I re-read the article today.

I was staggered by how well it all worked if you swapped “spreadsheet” for “AI.”