December 28, 2003
MarkBernstein.org
 

Learning Tinderbox

Doug Miller writes a superb overview of recent discussion of the challenges and rewards of learning to use Tinderbox.

I began to realize that the Web was a poor stepchild compared to what I could do with Tinderbox. Tinderbox is closer in spirit to Vannevar Bush's Memex or Ted Nelson's Xanadu than it is to the Web. Like the Web, Tinderbox presents a whole new canvas, a new landscape of thought space. Unlike the Web, which is primarily public and collaborative, the Tinderbox landscape is primarily private and maps to my own internal thought processes.
...Herein, I think, lies the challenge for the new Tinderbox user: it's a true hypertext writing and thinking space, and hypertext, real hypertext, not the subset of it we have on the Web, requires a different, non-linear thought process.