Computer Assisted Intuition — How Roam Research Fulfills the Web’s Original Dream

The argument that Roam Research completes what Tim Berners-Lee started and Ward Cunningham’s wiki half-finished: links made the web, but bi-directional links — the thing Wikipedia approximated and Roam made native — were the missing half.

Notes

• “Computers could become much more powerful if they could be programmed to link otherwise unconnected information,” thought Tim Berners-Lee in the 1980’s while dreaming up what became the World Wide Web.
• Links made that happen, but half of the original idea got lost along the way.
• Then came the in-browser editor with the Wiki, dreamed up by Ward Cunningham five years after Tim Berners-Lee’s WorldWideWeb, built to explore the way “programming ideas are carried by people as they move between projects.” #Wikipedia
• And so the foundation was laid. Anyone could edit and link anything, and they did, writing billions of words and linking concepts together. Even bi-directional linking came along, with Wikipedia’s somewhat-hidden What links here tool on every page listing the pages that reference it.
• Thus it fell to the next generation of developers to find better ways to link ideas. “We need better way of organizing the questions we are trying to answer, and making explicit the lines of reasoning we hold,” tweeted developer Conor White-Sullivan in early 2019. Months later, his now-viral app Roam Research would be one of the closest modern cousins to Enquire, Xanadu, and Bush’s Memex.
• Though perhaps, even bi-directional links and embedded sections may not be enough. You still have to remember to link things, decide in advance what may be of interest later, and make the mental connections to embed ideas from other documents.
• What if instead, the computer did that for you, turning everything into links and letting you connect things that in the past you never knew you’d find interesting? Unlinked References
• “Computers might not find the solutions to our problems,” wrote Tim Berners-Lee, “but they would be able to do the bulk of the legwork required, assisting our human minds in intuitively finding ways through the maze.”