The Shape of PSIBER Space: PostScript Interactive Bug Eradication Routines — October 1989. Written by Don Hopkins, October 1989.

https://donhopkins.medium.com/the-shape-of-psiber-space-octo...

Abstract

The PSIBER Space Deck is an interactive visual user interface to a graphical programming environment, the NeWS window system. It lets you display, manipulate, and navigate the data structures, programs, and processes living in the virtual memory space of NeWS. It is useful as a debugging tool, and as a hands on way to learn about programming in PostScript and NeWS.

PostScript Source Code Available Here:

http://www.donhopkins.com/home/pub/NeWS/litecyber/

Introduction

Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts … A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding ….

[Gibson, Neuromancer]

[...]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iuC_DDgQmsM

>PSIBER Space Deck Demo: Demo of the NeWS PSIBER Space Deck. Research performed under the direction of Mark Weiser and Ben Shneiderman. Developed and documented thanks to the support of John Gilmore and Julia Menapace. Developed and demonstrated by Don Hopkins.
Described in "The Shape of PSIBER Space: PostScript Interactive Bug Eradication Routines".

[...]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fqCeuue5Ac

>PSIBER Space Deck and Pseudo Scientific Visualizer Demo:
Demo of the PseudoScientific Visualizer and NeWS PSIBER Space Deck. Research performed under the direction of Mark Weiser and Ben Shneiderman. Developed and documented thanks to the support of John Gilmore and Julia Menapace. Developed and demonstrated by Don Hopkins.

[...]

The Pseudo Scientific Visualizer

Darkness fell in from every side, a sphere of singing black, pressure on the extended crystal nerves of the universe of data he had nearly become… And when he was nothing, compressed at the heart of all that dark, there came a point where the dark could be no more, and something tore. The Kuang program spurted from tarnished cloud, Case’s consciousness divided like beads of mercury, arcing above an endless beach the color of the dark silver clouds. His vision was spherical, as though a single retina lined the inner surface of a globe that contained all things, if all things could be counted.

[Gibson, Neuromancer]

The Pseudo Scientific Visualizer is the object browser for the other half of your brain, a fish-eye lens for the macroscopic examination of data. It can display arbitrarily large, arbitrarily deep structures, in a fixed amount of space. It shows form, texture, density, depth, fan out, and complexity.

It draws a compound object as a circle, then recursively draws its elements, scaled smaller, in an evenly spaced ring, rotated around the circle. The deeper an object, the smaller it is. It will only draw to a certain depth, which you can change while the drawing is in progress.

It has simple graphical icons for different data types. An array is a circle, and a dictionary is a circle with a dot. The icon for a string is a line, whose length depends on the length of the string. A name is a triangle. A boolean is a peace sign or an international no sign. An event is an envelope. A process is a Porsche.

It randomly forks off several light weight processes, to draw different parts of the display, so there is lots of drawing going on in different places at once, and the overlapping is less regular.

After the drawing is complete, the circular compound objects become mouse sensitive, selectable targets. The targets are implemented as round transparent NeWS canvases. When you move the cursor over one, it highlights, and you can click on it to zoom in, pop up a description of it, open up another view of it, or select it, and then push it onto the stack of the PSIBER Space Deck.

Figure 9 shows a Pseudo Scientific Visualization of the NeWS rootmenu instance dictionary, also shown in figure 3 and figure 8.

Figure 10 shows two views of a map of Adventure.

Figure 11 shows two views of a map of the ARPAnet.

ARPANET Psiber SPACE (circa 1986)

[...]

http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/arpanet/index-large.html

This is the network of IMPs (Interface Message Processors) that comprised the ARPANET in 1986. The ARPANET is history now, but thanks to the magic of Pseudo-Scientific Visualization and the ScriptX language and class library from Kaleida Labs, you can now experience what it was like to be free ranging packet hopping around the ARPANET in 1986!

This Pseudo-Scientific Visualization of the ARPANET was woven by the ScriptX language and class library from Kaleida Labs.

Select an IMP to jump into ARPANET Psiber Space. You can also view Text or Small Images.

http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/arpanet/index-large.html

http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/arpanet/index-text.html

http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/arpanet/index-small.html