Tumblers

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

For other meanings, see Tumbler.

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.

Address area	Tumbler Address	Comment
Node	1.2368.792.6	This is the computer with the number 2368.792.6
User	1.2368.792.6.0.6974.383.1988.352	This is user 6974.383.1988.352 on the above computer.
Document	1.2368.792.6.0.6974.383.1988.352.0.75	The user's document number 75.
Version	1.2368.792.6.0.6974.383.1988.352.0.75.2	Version 2 of the document.

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".

[edit] 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