Tumblers

Tumblers were proposed by Ted Nelson in "Literary Machines" as a means to address every bit ever written, or a particular span of bits in any text ever written. A tumbler is a unique numerical address of an interesting artifact. The address resembles an IP address, but is much larger and has much more detailed structure. The structure looks like this.

1. < node >.0. < user >.0. < document >.0. < element > The "1." is used in order to mark the start of a new address. The individual fields of the address are divided with ".0." so that they can be arbitratily long. Each < element > has the format "n. n. ... . n", a hierarchy of subaddresses. The last element denotes the special kind of element, for example: 1. Text/Bytes 2. Links 3. Bitmaps 4. etc.

The 9287th byte of this version of the document would be 1.2368.792.6.0.6974.383.1988.352.0.75.2.0.1.9287 and the 356th link would be 0.2.356 on the end instead. Tumblers are only issued once and never changed again. The structure can grow at will, the address space is practically infinite. Nelson also introduces the concept of "spans", and the idea of direction. One can speak of "2 chapters back" or "300 bytes forward".

See also

• Purple Numbers, a proposal to address paragraphs in Web pages.
• Cross-reference
• HyperScope, a modern system built using web technologies that brings advanced hypertext, addressing, and view control to the World Wide Web

External links

• Tumbler Arithmetic. Udanax.com™. Retrieved on May 22, 2004.
• The Xanadu model. Retrieved on January 13, 2004.
• Definitions. Sunless Sea. Retrieved on January 30, 2006. (Xanadu project wiki, restructured in August 2005)
• Theodor Holm Nelson (December 1999). "Xanalogical Structure. Needed Now More than Ever: Parallel Documents, Deep Links to Content, Deep Versioning, and Deep Re-Use". ACM Computing Surveys 31 (4).
• Theodor Holm Nelson's Homepage. Retrieved on January 13, 2004.