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So this hyper document idea and group
environment is really a key idea with addressability and
traceability, structuring, jumping on the fly, new control,
a bunch of stuff. And what you need to do is facilitate
the technology transfer and the engineering and the coevolution
of all that.
So everyone's used to saying a document
is the book, the paper, etc. Well, now it's moving to
be on-line pages in a web or it's E-mail coming to us.
It's a document. But the whole big thing that's an opportunity
is to say, when you externalize a bundle of concepts in
your head, that's going to be something you're going to
author. Okay. Putting it into a computer medium let's
you do a lot more than putting it together on pages. How
do you take advantage of it? So that was a question I
started asking myself.
And it seemed like one of the earliest
things you could really take off and experience and harness.
And so it's like saying, Hey, look. I don't want pages
until I'm going to print it out, then I'll have a page.
So what else can I do? I say, "The computer can go
out and help me to structure it." Great. So I'd like
to structure my concepts so that they're more meaningfully
oriented and somewhat related to the structuring in my
mind. I don't know what they'll be.
And then I say, "well, also I'd
like to have various ways of looking at it." When
the computer comes to a given place in a document, you
get all kinds of of ways to look at it. Well, today the
WYSIWYG, you look at it and you scroll past the pages.
And I said, God. You know, I didn't even think of that
for a minute. And I say, No.
One thing I'd like to do is just say,
give me the first line of every paragraph. Do I want blank
lines between them or not? What about numbering the paragraphs
so I know where I am and I can say, "Jump to paragraph
five"? Or do I want to organize it hierarchically? Let
me do that. Well, numbering then now, oh, I'll call it
, a, b, c. And if something's under b , it would be b,
b . And so I've got to give some new names to things then.
And scroll. And I want to move this paragraph here and
everything that's under it. I've got to give it a name.
Call it a "branch."
So then I've got a vocabulary of actions
that I've started doing. And I've got a vocabulary of
nouns, kinds of objects in there that are different. And
I've got a way of commanding them that's different.
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