News You Can Bruise for 2006 December 3

It looks like the Libre Map Project is paying off! I'm always happy at reductions in the gap between "public domain" and "available online".

I was reading a Steven Levy book (Insanely Great) about the development of the Macintosh, and after a while it went a little off the rails and started talking about things that were not t.d.o.t.M. But one of the things it mentioned was John Sculley's blue-sky idea of a notebook computer called the Knowledge Navigator, with software agents and voice recognition and basically everything you could want for the Navigation of Knowledge. Sculley even had a bunch of long-form commercials made for it.

Well, it didn't take me long to get up and search for those commercials online, where they now live. They're surprisingly similar to Douglas Adams's much more enjoyable Hyperland. In fact, I think Steven Levy was thinking about Hyperland when he described some aspects of Knowledge Navigator.