Geeks bearing gifts

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What Hacker News says

• uxp100 · May 19, 2021 · Recommends

  No, but also not just someone, Ted Nelson. I highly recommend Geeks Bearing Gifts or Computer Lib/Dream Machines. He is a crank, who has never been involved in a successful software project as far as I am aware. He is also great.

  on “A Gentle Introduction to Ted Nelson's ZigZag Structure (2002)” ↗
• leoc · May 26, 2013 · Recommends

  His /Geeks Bearing Gifts/ http://www.lulu.com/shop/ted-nelson/geeks-bearing-gifts/pape... http://hyperland.com/ccynPage.htm is well worth the money too.

  on “Ted Nelson's Computer Paradigm Expressed as One-Liners (1999)” ↗
• sideb0ard · Dec 29, 2013 · Recommends

  …stuff up till, but not disappointingly not including Unix. John Markoff's 'What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry' - what is says! Ted Nelson's 'Geeks Bearing Gifts' (or any of his YouTube Computers For Cynics videos) - awesome, curmudgeonly alternative (but accurate) version of computer history. Michael A. Hiltzik's 'Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn…

  on “Ask PG/HN: Recommended reading on the history of technology” ↗
• leoc · Jan 27, 2014 · Recommends

  It's Ted Nelson rattling through some of his computer-history notes on camera. So it's good material, but it's much better presented in his enjoyable and reasonably-priced book /Geeks Bearing Gifts/ http://www.lulu.com/shop/ted-nelson/geeks-bearing-gifts/pape... . I noted a couple of apparent mistakes: at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c6SUOeAqOjU#t=4m26s Nelson says that Xerox paid Jobs to look…

  on “Ted Nelson: It All Went Wrong at Xerox PARC” ↗
• leoc · Feb 2, 2019 · Recommends

  His Geeks Bearing Gifts is a more detailed, written treatment of the same material: http://www.lulu.com/shop/ted-nelson/geeks-bearing-gifts/pape... . It's also a more affordable alternative to Computer Lib/Dream Machines if…

  on “Interview with Ted Nelson” ↗
• sideb0ard · Jan 7, 2020 · Recommends

  All good recs so far. Here's a few I haven't seen mentioned yet - Computing in the Middle Ages: A View From the Trenches 1955-1983 - Severo Ornstein Early British Computers - Simon Lavington Geeks Bearing Gifts - Ted Nelson (and also Computer Lib/Dream Machines) more recently - UNIX: A History and a Memoir by Brian Kernighan

  on “Ask HN: What are more books like “Masters of Doom” or “Showstoppers”?” ↗
• GuiA · Jun 5, 2014 · Recommends

  …Ted Nelson. Ted Nelson is a fundamental figure of early computing (despite not being a computer scientist himself). His work (recommended: Dream Machines/Computer Lib, 1974; Literary Machines, 1981; Geeks Bearing Gifts, 2008) is about how computers touch us as humans, and how they affect our future, especially when it comes to communicating and using them to spread+build knowledge and ideas. When Nelson wrote his first…

  on “Xanadu: we have a working deliverable” ↗
• asciilifeform · Jun 5, 2009 · Mentions

  …things and short-sighted to the future, which might one day care about the things that got lost." Yet most programmers seem to be entirely unaware that these marvels ever existed. Even Ted Nelson's "Geeks Bearing Gifts", the supposedly iconoclastic "we're doing it all wrong" history of computing leaves them out entirely. How many people here have ever programmed on a Lisp Machine? I recall that PG once wrote about…

  on “Ask HN: How many of you have used or even heard of a Lisp Machine?” ↗
• walterbell · Jun 27, 2014 · Mentions

  …1970s) http://www.amazon.com/The-Universal-History-Computing-Comput... 2002, Electronic Brains (UK, US & Ukraine soon after WWII) http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/science/electronicbrains.shtml http://www.amazon.com/Electronic-Brains-Stories-Dawn-Compute... 2008, Geeks Bearing Gifts, Ted Nelson (rants & factoids) http://www.amazon.com/Geeks-Bearing-Gifts-Ted-Nelson/dp/0578... 2010, Commodore, A Company on the Edge, Brian Bagnall (war stories from 6502 through C64, no Amiga) http://retroasylum.com/commodore-a-company-on-the-edge-revie... http://www.amazon.com/Commodore-Company-Edge-Brian-Bagnall/d...…

  on “Thoughts on the culture that gave birth to the personal computer (2013)” ↗
• _delirium · Dec 1, 2010 · Mentions

  Ted Nelson's Geeks Bearing Gifts: How the Computer World Got This Way (2009) is an interesting read, though of a particular variety. It's fairly negative and contrarian, as usual with his stuff, and also pretty disorganized and rambling,…

  on “What recent books should I be reading?” ↗
• skmurphy · Mar 7, 2009 · Critical

  "Geeks Bearing Gifts" was a huge disappointment. I read through it in about an hour. Not much insight for anyone on HN and in the end a waste of time.

  on “In Venting, a Computer Visionary Educates” ↗