Duration: 8:02

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Ted Nelson designed the user experience for this early word processing program in the 1970s, and a working version was produced in the early 1980s. It was rebuilt in 1986 and can be run on the Internet Archive at https://archive.org/details/jot_0.53_ted_nelson



Some technical information about JOT internals can be found in Ted's autobiography: Possiplex, pages 185-198


In my talk I say that the system is difficult for modern users - what I mean is that people who have been trained on traditional word processors would find the keyboard language and mode switching non-intuitive. If we had been trained on Jot it would have been natural and under our fingertips. So the challenge for us is to take the concepts demonstrated in Jot and map them to modern UI paradigms (or change the paradigm to something new, as Ted bravely tried and continues to persist).