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weaving the web

We rewrote all the motor controls to optimize the movement of the print head so it was fast. It could also print Arabic, draw three-dimensional pictures, and give the effect of preprinted stationery while using less expensive paper. We wrote our own markup language in which documents were prepared, and the printer could also handle input codes of much more expensive typesetting machines. We could change not only fonts but almost any aspect of the printer's behavior.

The business went well, but the technology we were working with was limited to what we could put into printers. I felt I needed a change from living in Britain, and I remembered that CERN had a fellowship program. In the spring of 1983 I decided to apply, arriving eventually in September 1984. As a gift upon my departure from Image, John gave me a Compaq personal computer. It was touted as one of the first "portable" computers, but it looked more like a sewing machine, more "luggable" than portable. With my new PC, and the freshness that comes with change, I wrote in my spare time another play program, called Tangle. I wanted to continue to explore the ideas about connections that were evolving in my head.

In an extreme view, the world can be seen as only connections, nothing else. We think of a dictionary as the repository of meaning, but it defines words only in terms of other words. I liked the idea that a piece of information is really defined only by what it's related to, and how it's related. There really is little else to meaning. The structure is everything. There are billions of neurons in our brains, but what are neurons? Just cells. The brain has no knowledge until connections are made between neurons. All that we know, all that we are, comes from the way our neurons are connected.

Computers store information as sequences of characters, so meaning for them is certainly in the connections among characters. In Tangle, if a certain sequence of characters recurred, it