My hypermedia history

John Ohno
5 min readDec 31, 2017

So, I actually have a long history of (mostly failed or unsatisfying) hypermedia-adjacent or Alan Kay-ish projects, starting way back in the sourceforge days.

First big one was called Sakura Hypermedia Desktop, and was a TCL/TK thing that you’d configure as your root window. You could rewrite parts of the code from a popup command line and persist those changes, and I had widgets. Ultimately, lack of proper multithreading and an inability to overlap widgets killed my plans for this.

(I could redo it today and make it way better (even sticking to TK) just by writing…

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John Ohno

Resident hypertext crank. Author of Big and Small Computing: Trajectories for the Future of Software. http://www.lord-enki.net