Old computer Challenge week 2025 for July 18th Time flies when you're having fun, huh? Today I mostly want to talk about Mark's incredible cyberhole (.online). https://mdhughes.tech/2025/07/15/old-computer-challenge/ Well, actually the non-old-computer-challenge markwrites immediately before it: https://mdhughes.tech/2025/04/22/some-of-my-history-of-hypertext/ in which mdhughes explains his computing origin in the books (to just rip off his article) Stimulating Simulations (Engel '77), Creative Computing Magazine (ed. Ahl '74-'85), Basic Computer Games, Microcomputer Edition (Ahl '78), Unnamed TRS-80 BASIC book, My Computer Likes Me When I Speak BASIC (Albrecht '72) and Computer Lib/Dream Machines (Nelson '74-75). Mdh follows Nelson's trajectory past the life and death of Hypercard, "The Future We Didn't Get" to his eventual own traumatic realization that Xanadu was never arriving as such. Absolutely great article, best paired with Mark introducing everyone to his cyberhole.online for OCC. Now, I did not know anything about Ted Nelson prior to knowing mdh. People would sometimes say things to me - Kent Pitman mentioned reading Literary Machines in his post ex facto writeup of his Cross Referenced Editing Facility back at MIT, but, well, I haven't read it yet, I haven't read Computer Lib/Dream Machines yet either. But I think I can add one paragraph you didn't know. About a year ago I got a message from someone on the Mastodon - the only message I have ever received that was explicitly about Erik Sandewall's CAISOR paradigm - all that software stuff and that 50 year openaccess bibliography I collected. The message said something like, "CAISOR and XANADU were the two rivals for the future of computing, eh?" with a link to this youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/TheTedNelson . I had absolutely no idea what was being said to me or what Xanadu was or whom this message came from, and the conversation didn't pick up. Much later, I think it was WeekendEditor (Dylan?) on the Mastodon that might have explained more of Nelson to me speaking from a position of personal friendship and asking that people not be unkind to Nelson's work as a sincere visionary helping us towards an unknown better future (on a mention of web microtransactions, an idea that perhaps aged poorly). If I can add something about Sandewall's work, of which I am some kind of scholar. Related to what I've been doing- Sandewall didn't think it was reasonable to just copy a software, similar to the philosophical problems of making an exact clone of a developed human with memories intact. Obviously the lisp hacker's copy of a software is a living, acclimating, continuously existing one in a sort of mixed initiative relationship with that one hacker. Then deploying software might be more like deliberately breeding a mule - a sterile but very work suitable hybrid somewhat derived from the programmer's personal software, but really with only a small contribution of what-its-donkey-parent-is-actually-like, with another initial contribution from say, the software equivalent of a mule's mare mother, though the new 'deployed' software itself is sterile and quite different to either parent. This is why in the Leonardo system, while your interactions that grow an individual are intricate, the outcome at runtime of most of the programmer's contribution ends up in attributes in property lists on symbols, and the sterile mule of deployment, not capable of the rich and dynamic lives of its parent, is initially just a dump of some attributes in its parent's plist, with contributions from another parent's attributes who has learned things about the target deployment environment. Sorry, I wanted to have some kinds of original contribution this occ article. Returning to mdh's notes and living experience of software for a moment. Maybe old computer challenge is not best viewed as an experience of retro hardware or software, but as a forward compatible receiving point for hyperlinks from the past.