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Data Storage The Internet Technology

Xanadu: The Forgotten Hypertext 261

Posted by timothy from the man-with-the-ultimate-demo dept.
wikinerd writes "Xanadu, a project started in the 1960s to create a deep-linked hypertext infrastructure with xanalogical structures, is still alive, although largely forgotten due to the emergence of the Web."
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Xanadu: The Forgotten Hypertext More

Xanadu: The Forgotten Hypertext

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  • Was. (Score:5, Funny)

    by GillBates0 ( 664202 ) on Wednesday January 19, 2005 @03:29PM (#11411332) Homepage Journal
    WAS alive. Thank you /..

    • Re:Was. (Score:2, Interesting)

      by nairb774 ( 728193 )
      I as looking to see what this was all about. Anyone with other resources or mirrors? Doubt the mirrors due to the time the server stood up. nairb774

    • Re:Was. (Score:3, Funny)

      by khallow ( 566160 )
      You know, we ought to get some kickback from the /. admins for providing web euthanasia services.

      • Ted Nelson (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Jeremiah Cornelius ( 137 ) on Wednesday January 19, 2005 @04:10PM (#11411888) Homepage Journal
        He never understood that the perfect was the enemy of the good...

        More "worse is better" thinking brought us, first gopher and next the WWW.

        Someday, we'll be semantic, and the same as Xanadu - a project named for Colridge's opium hallucination.

        • Agreed. But I also think he was a little out of touch with some real-world social and legal issues. He envisioned a very centralized approach to electronic publishing. That might have helped with the cross referencing, and fair rewards for content creators. But it would have been a totaly disaster for civil liberties.

          The real killer was that such a central content repository was just plain impractical. Thank God for that!

          • Nelson invented teh term HyperText, but almost every implication of a networked world eluded him. He is still around - Odd duck.

            Years back, I knew folks who worked on Xanadu when Autodesk had picked it up. By '92 this was over, but Nelsonism still reigned. The wind really went out of their sails when Mosaic and Trumpet WinSock started showing up on Intern's desks...

    • Re:Was. (Score:2, Funny)

      by AndroidCat ( 229562 )
      The last access that brought it down was by some guy from Porlock.

    • Re:Was. (Score:4, Funny)

      by narcc ( 412956 ) on Wednesday January 19, 2005 @06:18PM (#11413334) Journal
      If no one ever reads the articles ... What really causes a slashdoting?

      Xanadu enthusiasts?

  • Movie reference (Score:4, Funny)

    by ectotherm ( 842918 ) on Wednesday January 19, 2005 @03:29PM (#11411341)
    Do all Xanadu programmers look like Olivia Newton John?
    • Better her than Geddy Lee...
    • Its funny, I didn't know anything about the movie Xanadu, but I remember this DJ Shadow song with a sample of a woman saying "When I came to America, I saw Xanadu, and that's all I wanted to do, roller skate." I had no idea what she was talking about.

      Now I do. ;-)
    • An earlier movie reference is Citizen Kane.
      Xanadu was the name of Kane's mansion.

      • Kubla Khan
        by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

        In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
        A stately pleasure-dome decree:
        Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
        Through caverns measureless to man
        Down to a sunless sea.
        So twice five miles of fertile ground
        With walls and towers were girdled round:
        And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
        Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;
        And here were forests ancient as the hills,
        Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.

        But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted
        Down the green hill
    • No, they look like romantic poets [muohio.edu] who've had too much laudanum [wikipedia.org].

      Could I revive within me
      Her symphony and song,
      To such a deep delight 'twould win me
      That with music loud and long
      I would build that dome in air,
      That sunny dome! those caves of ice!
      And all who heard should see them there,
      And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
      His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
      Weave a circle round him thrice,
      And close your eyes with holy dread,
      For he on honey-dew hath fed
      And drunk the milk of Paradise.
      -- Samuel T

    • Nelson makes me think of Bill Gates.

  • Ohhhh (Score:3, Funny)

    by Hawthorne01 ( 575586 ) on Wednesday January 19, 2005 @03:30PM (#11411356)
    So *that's* what happened to ELO and Olivia Newton-John.

    Gene Kelly deserved better than to be in that crapfest.

  • So the web was invented earlier than we thought? (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 19, 2005 @03:30PM (#11411357)
    Oh, boy, Al Gore is going to be pissed off...

  • please don't awaken xanadu (Score:4, Funny)

    by corpsiclex ( 735510 ) <dark.logic@comcast.net> on Wednesday January 19, 2005 @03:31PM (#11411363) Homepage
    ...is still alive, although largely forgotten

    shhhh...must..not..remember!!

  • Forgotten due to the emergence of the Web... (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Actually, it was largely forgotten due to the performance of the Olivia Newton John.
    • performance of the Olivia Newton John.

      From what I hear, the performance of the Olivia Newton John (ONJ) was actually pretty high when compared to the early Pentiums. Sure it was a 16-bit processor with limited access to RAM, but for it's day, it had some truly unique innovations. Now... the performance of the Kylie Minogue is another thing entirely. That processor completely kicks the ass of even the lowly Itanium and Opteron processors. I, for one welcome our Aussie Pop Diva overclocked overlords.

  • An old protocol.. (Score:2, Funny)

    by grub ( 11606 )

    xanadu://olivia.newton-john
  • With a name like that, no wonder it was forgotten. Xanudu, Xunudu, Xunado, ahh screw it.

  • Not forgotten...ignored (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 19, 2005 @03:34PM (#11411409)
    wired did an article several years ago on xanadu. no other progress occurred. I'm guessing that the web is good enough that the few concepts that xanadu had over the web today only really interested a handful of people. the web is the 90 percent solution to the problem, and if the other 10 percent really want to *fix* it , then they need to take care of it themselves. You know what they say about the last 10 percent of the project...

    • Not ignored - not appreciated. (Score:4, Informative)

      by fatbuddha ( 851420 ) on Wednesday January 19, 2005 @04:08PM (#11411857)
      I think that everybody is in agreement that the Xanadu ideas are great, it's just that nothing has yet all that usefull has materialised. I can't think of a single person that I've shown it to that hasn't said the same thing: great concepts, but where is the implementation? Fortunately there is a team of people in Nottingham (UK) that are working hard on getting something done that actually works. I've met the team, and I've seen the prototypes. All I can say is wow. Check out this websight for some videos that show just how some of these ideas are being brought to life, and leave some comments for the developers on the forum: http://www.hypertexture.com [hypertexture.com]

    • Re:Not forgotten...ignored (Score:4, Interesting)

      by tricorn ( 199664 ) <sep@shout.net> on Wednesday January 19, 2005 @04:40PM (#11412210) Journal

      The biggest problem he seemed to have was that he wanted to make sure everyone would get paid the appropriate royalties for each little bit. Click a link to a commentary about a paragraph, you pay micro-cents to the person who wrote the original paragraph, the person who wrote the commentary, and the person who created the link that you used to get there. Without all that, the system would have already been done by now.

  • Ted Nelson is brilliant but insane. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Chip Salzenberg ( 1124 ) on Wednesday January 19, 2005 @03:35PM (#11411413) Homepage
    There will never be one knowledge network with one administrative body. That's what Xanadu was supposed to be.

    I do wish I had editors that kept historical trees instead of a single undo chain, though.

    • I remember a PBS special on the origin of HTTP and they did mention and interview Ted Nelson. They talked for a few minutes but the only thing he said was that HTML was worse than Xanadu. His only way to reinforce that claim was that it was just better, no explaination on why. I still went away wondering what the heck it was. Interestingly, all the information I found was pretty much just sets of linear documents without hyperlinking.
      • Interestingly, all the information I found was pretty much just sets of linear documents without hyperlinking.
        The Xanduvians were always better at telling people why they should use hypertext than at using it themselves.
    • I do wish I had editors that kept historical trees instead of a single undo chain, though.

      Space requirements of O(2^n) rule!

      Seriously, though, how would you navigate it?
      • I would imagine it would have to be visually. Perhaps a menu system showing you the edit choices. After you hilight the selection another menu could provide the continuing branches, etc.

        Once you've finalized your edit it would probably be helpful to have something keeping track of final edits, allowing you to revert to prior edits.

        Interesting but complex. It certainly wouldn't be your average editor.
    • You can easily replace Ted's central data storage with something distributed such as a P2P network à la Kademlia.

      They key point of his work is that all data is in the same globally adressable "carpet" that nobody can modify. Nothing is deleted, only added. When you want to "modify" something, you write a new copy and link to that new data instead. And you get the tree you talked about.

      As long as someone on the network is interested in the data (ie. is caching it) it will remain available to everyone
  • They are right...I had forgoteen about it long ago...I haven't even touched my NES system in a LONG time! :)

  • Xanadu associations (Score:3, Informative)

    by AtariAmarok ( 451306 ) on Wednesday January 19, 2005 @03:36PM (#11411437)
    Xanadu associations:

    Mention it pre-1970s, and everyone thinks of Coleridge and the pleasure dome of Kublai Khan.

    Mention it post-1970s, and everyone thinks of Olivia Newton-John in her roller disco boots.

  • Olivia Neutron Bomb / Electric Link Orchestra (Score:5, Funny)

    by Tackhead ( 54550 ) on Wednesday January 19, 2005 @03:38PM (#11411463)
    A dream, where Ted Nelson dared to go,
    His server was fine, y'know,
    'Til we linked to Xanadu.

    And now, click on the link and see,
    The website's now 503,
    Slashdotted Xanadu.

    A million lights are dancing and there you are, a shooting star
    No Google cache I see, so you're 503, eternally

    Chorus:
    Xanadu! XanaduuuuoooooooOOooOO!, (now we are here) in Xanadu!
    Xanadu! XanaduuuuoooooooOOooOO!, (pass me a beer) in Xanadu!
    (Colo boxen blinkenlights will shine... for you, Xanadu!)

    (Repeat chorus until 404 or 503...)

  • links galore (Score:5, Informative)

    by ink_polaroid ( 703765 ) <`inkpolaroid' `at' `comcast.net'> on Wednesday January 19, 2005 @03:40PM (#11411478)
    While they're putting out the fire in whatever server they were running, you can read this [wired.com],a 27-page Wired article from 1995.

    Also check this [fourmilab.ch], that [wikipedia.org], and the other [pbs.org].

  • BT (Score:4, Funny)

    by mgs1000 ( 583340 ) on Wednesday January 19, 2005 @03:43PM (#11411517) Journal
    So does this infringe on British Telecom's hypertext patent from the eighties? :)

  • An excellent Wired article about this (Score:4, Informative)

    by freshmkr ( 132808 ) on Wednesday January 19, 2005 @03:44PM (#11411541) Homepage
    Wired had an excellent long article about the Xanadu project in 1995---great storytelling. Seen here: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/3.06/xanadu_pr. html [wired.com].

  • Very much alive (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    There is a lot going on with Xanadu, and the project has great potential. There is a hard working team that is working on making some of Ted Nelson's dreams come true. Check out http://www.hypertexture.com for some fascinating videos that show just how some of this stuff works. There is also a discussion forum for you to provide you're own 2 cents, and get in touch directly with some of the developers.

  • Gopher (Score:2)

    by ari_j ( 90255 )
    Forget Xanadu. Gopher [wikipedia.org] is the true overlord of Internet protocols.
    • Just think, if Gopher had been invented at UC Santa Cruz, it'd be called Slug or Banana Slug. Then we'd say stuff like, "I was doing some research, so I had to slug your server."

  • Here's a thought...
    Xanadu might be more than a curiosity, if something can be shown to have been used in Xanadu for a long time, it just might provide a case for prior art, in order to quash a few stupid HTML and GUI method patents.

    • I don't know the particulars, but according to wikipedia [wikipedia.org], something like this occured in 1988 when Ted released the source code to Xanadu as Project Udanax, to help overturn some patents. Unfortunately, wikipedia provides no further detail on the case(s). I'm not sure if Xanadu had any impact on the BT hyperlink patent case, for instance.

  • Why Xanadu died (Score:3, Insightful)

    by rewt66 ( 738525 ) on Wednesday January 19, 2005 @03:46PM (#11411567)
    Xanadu is dead. In fact, Xanadu was never alive. It could have been. But...

    They were so sure that it was going to be hot stuff that they kept the data structures secret that were needed to implement it. So... nobody implemented it.

    Then came the web, and it was good enough. The need has been filled, and nobody cares about Xanadu. Even if there was a free, publicly available implementation, nobody would care.

    Ego and greed killed Xanadu - or rather, kept it from ever being born.
    • "Xanadu is dead. In fact, Xanadu was never alive"

      So who went and appointed you Netcraft?

    • The web took the "cream" of the some of the needs that are there. However, Xanadu also developed a lot of ideas that are now being seen in Content Management Systems.


      There were some fundamental problems here-but I suspect that we'll see quite a few ideas that were proposed by Nelson developed over time.

    • The web is not good enough. The web is nowhere near good enough. The web is based on a very weak hypertext system: HTML. As far as hypertext systems go, HTML it is a quick and dirty solution to a much more complex problem. Beyond that, we now have XML, which is an even quicker and dirtier solution to the same complex problem.

      The problem I'm talking about is symbolically linking context. It's very hard to do this with strings because strings are linear and context is not. For instance, in HTML, if I
      • The gripes you have about the web are _exactly_ why html and the web succeeded where something like Xanadu did not.

        Firstly, I can only link one thing at a time.[...]Secondly, HTML is linear.

        Or, in other words, the concepts are simple to understand - a link just points a finger from here to some other spot somewhere in ordinary linear documents, which we all are used to create, read and manipulate. The text you see is the text you have; any text from the outside is either in the form of a reference mark

  • Keith Henson Needs Help (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    SEE: http://www.keithhenson.org/ [keithhenson.org]

    from: kuro5hin.org || technology and culture, from the trenches

    Keith Henson Needs Help (MLP)
    By Baldrson
    Wed Sep 15th, 2004 at 07:42:14 AM EST

    For those who don't know him, Keith Henson co-founded the L5 Society, was
    President of Xanadu Corporation and was a featured character in The Great
    Mambo Chicken and the Transhuman Condition: Science Slightly Over the Edge.
    He's about to be deported from Canada to the United States where he faces
    time in the infamous California prison sy

  • Ted's book (Score:2, Interesting)

    by ch-chuck ( 9622 )
    The software proect may have been too ambitious to be practical (on hardward of the time) but just try to touch his 1974 book [digibarn.com] for less than $100 (not the Msft reprint).

    • A hundred bucks, huh? Guess I better treat my copy more nicely -- except that the damn thing's too big to fit on a normal bookshelf. (That's one advantage of the reprint.)

  • Ah, yes Xanadu (Score:5, Insightful)

    by hey! ( 33014 ) on Wednesday January 19, 2005 @03:51PM (#11411638) Homepage Journal
    Everything is deeply intertwingled.


    If you recognize what I just said, you're too old to be in this business. Other signs are: responding to most of your younger colleage's ideas with variations of "we tried that once, it didn't work," or rambling on about what it was like to program with 2K of working memory.

    As for the rest of you, if you want to know why "old timer" is usually preceded by "bitter"...

    You kids down't know how bad you have it these days. Back in the halcyon days when Xanadu showed its promise, there were no credentials. You didn't need no certifications, or even a degree. There was no functional monopoly anymore, IBM was the evil empire, but its power was eviscerated by fighting the DOJ for a decade. DEC produced nice machines and software. Jobs were plentiful and you could take your pick of platform.

    The future was bright; Microsoft was just a twinkle in Bill's eye. The only people who worked in computers were smart. There were no such things as frameworks, only libraries whose lack of documentation was made up for by their small size. Compiling a program longer than a thousand lines meant you had time for a walk in the park, or to socialize with your colleagues, or play a text, or read Usenet posts.

    Jobs were plentiful and there was no offshoring, so pay was high. The birth control pill had been invented, and there wasn't anything you could catch that couldn't be cured by a course of penicillin, so women were easy.

    Nobody had heard of spyware or adware or even worms or viruses -- the nastiness thing anybody had was a "chain job". Software was going to transform the world, entirely for the good. Practically every idea, like Xanadu, was big and transformative.Hacking was a constructive activity and an outlet for creativity. There was nobody to stop you, because nobody had any idea of how to measure programmer productivity.

    Well I guess some things don't change.

    • As for the rest of you, if you want to know why "old timer" is usually preceded by "bitter"...

      If you can keep an open mind long enough to see that utopia is the definitive oxymoron, continue to celebrate all that has been, is and will be great, and allow sadness but not distress at details that might have been better, then you know not only that life has been very good to you, but that it will likely continue to be great for many to come.

      Of course we can strive to make it better. I still want to help mak

  • ...we slashdot the site and kill it for good.
  • TN finally opened up the sourcecode for Xanadu [udanax.com] under the somewhat bizare name of Udanax. This was covered in a /. story a few years back.


    That server is also dead.


    The last time I checked the source there, there was no evidence of code maintenance, so I don't know if anyone is working on it. There's no Freshmeat record for either Xanadu or Udanax, suggesting that nobody has forked the code.


    Freshmeat does refer to a data organization package by Nielson, called ZigZag, which allowed multi-dimensional data organization, but I don't know enough about it to say if it'll do anything that other data schemes (HDF5, netCDF, XML, ....) don't.

    • ZigZag is a pretty nifty data organisation idea. Everything is linked together along "dimensions" that describe some property. e.g. start at a person's details, go out along the "age" dimension and you'll find everyone else of that age. Or go out on the "city" dimension and find everyone in the same city.

      There are two problems with it. The first is that no one except Ted thinks that way. That's just not how we tend to organise things to ourselves in the everyday. The second is that you can get 95% o

  • The Elohim Destroyed Xanadu? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Baldrson ( 78598 ) * on Wednesday January 19, 2005 @04:06PM (#11411831) Homepage Journal
    During some rocket engine work with Roger Gregory [geocities.com] I discussed the failure of the Xanadu project with him a few times. He mentioned something as a major contributing factor, if not _the_ major contributing factor, to the fall of the Xanadu project that I haven't seen mentioned anywhere else. Maybe I misunderstood him but if not, it wouldn't be the first time I ran across some crucial history of a major technological development project that hadn't made the press. (See my transistor [geocities.com] and fusion [geocities.com] links for examples.)

    As many might have known, the Xanadu culture has a lot of neologisms -- more than most software projects. They tried to use these neologisms in a consistent manner but you can imagine how difficult it would have been to really get things right with all those new words. Roger said someone, Mark Miller I believe, ran a sourcecode conversion on the Xanadu sourcecode base which did a right-shift (or was it left shift?) of one for all the the Xanadu glossary terms.

    This was supposed to be a "joke" since of course all of the major programmers of the Xanadu project were memory demigods (except of course Ted Nelson who admits he needs to videotape everything because of his faulty memory) but the effect was a bit more than a mere joke, resembling to some significant degree the effect the Elohim had on the builders of the Tower of Babel when they made them speak different languages.

  • Good news! (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Spy der Mann ( 805235 ) <`moc.liamg' `ta' `todhsals.nnamredyps'> on Wednesday January 19, 2005 @04:13PM (#11411920) Homepage Journal
    When someone tries to patent "hyperlinks", we can show them prior art! :P

  • Open Transmedia (nee Xanadu): Still-Born (Score:5, Informative)

    by ewhac ( 5844 ) on Wednesday January 19, 2005 @04:17PM (#11411967) Homepage Journal

    I watched the "progress" of Xanadu (later renamed Open Transmedia) from a large-ish distance for some 15 years. Nelson's central idea of "transclusion" -- to seamlessly and dynamically incorporate, within your work, any segment from any version of any other work (which itself may incorporate transclusions) -- was and still is very interesting. The World-Wide Web doesn't even begin to approach the power and flexibility of Nelson's model.

    But always present within Nelson's talks was this pernicious issue of royalties. The person who writes an original work and places it on the Open Transmedia network could demand to receive a royalty every time someone read it, or when transcluded segments of it were read, as part of another document. When you take into account that transclusions can themselves contain transclusions, with no nesting limit or limits against circular references, it's easy to see that the billing algorithms and infrastructure alone was effectively an insoluble problem. The intractibility of the problem, along with Nelson's adamance on the point, is what kept me from investigating Open Transmedia more closely. I had always felt that, if Nelson had simply dropped the royalty "requirement", Open Transmedia would have become a hell of a lot simpler, and it might exist today.

    The other thing that held Xanadu back was Nelson's persistent refusal to demonstrate what he claimed he had working in the lab. As near as I can tell (which is another way of my saying, "This is a wild guess"), Nelson hoped to earn money from patents on Xanadu's mechanisms and implementation, and feared early disclosure would reveal enough that potential rivals would be able to hack together a competing implementation before his system was complete. (Not an unreasonable position to take, especially given Microsoft's history of crufting together half-assed clone products and rushing them out the door to gain market share.) Despite what he may have had working in the lab, the popular perception gradually became that he had nothing.

    Writing is Nelson's principal vocation, so it's easy to see why the issue of royalties and compensation was so important to him. It's my opinion that, had he been a bit more altruistic in Open Transmedia's design, it would exist today, and the Web would be a much more flexible, powerful medium.

    Understand that this is solely my opinion, based largely on the relatively coarse, sporadic information I've collected over the years. There's a hell of a lot more detail here which I freely admit I'm missing.

    By the way, Nelson hasn't been completely idle since Xanadu. Check out ZigZag [xanadu.com] sometime. You will either find it intensely fascinating, or completely confusing (I myself often zig-zag between the two views when thinking about ZigZag).

    Schwab

    • I was in touch with Ted Nelson back in 1993 - we were working at a little start-up company on a proposal for electronic publishing over the internet, and Xanadu seemed like it could work - then we heard about the World Wide Web :-) Unfortunately the place we were doing the proposal for hired me instead of taking up the company's proposal, so I was too busy to get rich...

      We actually talked on the phone at one point. Nelson's smart, but somehow never quite caught that the power of the internet was in its op

  • What the… xand??? Xandau?? (Score:3, Funny)

    by jspoon ( 585173 ) on Wednesday January 19, 2005 @04:19PM (#11411998)
    Did anyone else waste 30 seconds of his life trying to figure out what a logical exclusive and would work like? Please let me not be the only one.
  • Kane's estate in Citizen Kane. Kane was (looosely) based on the life of the publishing magnate William Randolph Hearst. Xanadu was based on Hearst's San Simeon estate.
  • Xanadu is cool and all... but this is quite questionable "news." The article linked seems to be from 2000. The site in question has been around since 1960. There doesn't seem to be much in the way of news here, except for wikinerd going "oh! xanadu is still alive!" Is that the story? wikinerd discovers xanadu, you should too!?
    • >> The site in question has been around since 1960.

      Wow that was forward-looking. having a website 15 years before TCP/IP was invented is waaay coool.
  • I think that it was in the late 1980s - not sure.

    At that time, I was getting into hypertext tools and Xanadu looked good, but if I remember correctly, no code. A very bright sysadmin at PacBell (Karl Wabe) showed me the original WWW stuff at CERN - basically a lot of physics papers linked together. The browser was text based (lynx like). Very cool.

    The great thing about the WWW early on was that software was available - it was shortly seeing the CERN system that our sysadmin at SAIC installed the CERN web

  • File it away with the Dymaxion car, (Score:3, Insightful)

    by dpbsmith ( 263124 ) on Wednesday January 19, 2005 @04:55PM (#11412363) Homepage
    and Ovonics, and the Hiller flying platform, and Tesla's wireless power tranmission, and the GeOS operating system, and a thousand and one other brilliantly innovative things that coulda been a contender... things that still make the people that knew them cast longing looks into a wonderful past.

    What made these things so wonderful was that they were 10% real and 90% handwaving. None of them were outright fakery and none of their inventors were outright charlatans, but for all the glitter of gold dust it was never clear that any of them were backed by a real vein that could actually be mined.
  • The powerful idea here is that works of creatively in a Net-centric world tend to be derivative. E.g, complications + some new original contributions, which could range from new prose to editorial comments or just some indexing scheme. As we can see in the music industry, the idea of creating new works from whole cloth is largely dead. We need something like thimble space to handle the IP ownership, control, credit or just know who to give reputation points to.

    I remember hearing Ted Nelson talk at the same
  • If you're interested in learning how Ted Nelson's Xanadu influenced the development of the Web, take a look at the paper I wrote a few years ago:

    The World-Wide Web: Origins and Beyond
    http://www.zeltser.com/web-history/ [zeltser.com]

    The paper also briefly discusses the influences on the development of Xanadu itself.

  • I remember watching a BBC documentary about HyperText and the Xanadu system years ago. It was written by Douglas Adams, and featured himself and ex-"Doctor Who" Tom Baker. It discussed the Xanadu system and I remember "Kubla Khan" featuring heavily, using a hypertext system to annotate the poem. The only other things that stick in my memory about the programme are Tom Baker's distinctive (and slightly spooky) voice, and a big stack of televisions in a junkyard... not sure what they were!

    This was all severa
  • Here's some email I sent to Dave Winer in 1999 about my initial reactions to Xanadu going Open Source, which he asked me to publish on his proto-blog.

    Author: Don Hopkins
    Posted: 8/27/1999; 9:50:10 PM
    Topic: Xanadu--some initial reactions

    I sent this to Dave and he insisted I post it, but I'm not sure it will fit, so I'm posting it in parts... I suppose Xanadu would solve all these problems, but hey we're stuck with the World Wide Web today, so you're all going to have to SUFFER!!! Condolences in adva

  • To seek the sacred river Alpha To walk the caves of mice To break my fast on Honeywell And drink the milk of P-r-0-N... I had heard the whispered tales of immorality The deepest mystery From an ancient Ebook I took a clue I scaled the frozen mountain tops of eastern lands unknown Time and Man alone Searching for the lost Xanadu Xanadu... To stand within the Transclusion Decreed by Ted Nelson To taste anew the fruits of life The last immoral man To find the sacred river Alpha To walk the caves of mice Oh, I
  • If you get within screaming distance of Marin County Ted will tell how he invented the first web protype- loudly and often.
  • There were several hypertext projects in the 1980s. I liked Apple's HyperCard. However, it was Berners- Lee's that caught on. His was relatively simple, had most of the basic parts, and most importantly, was freely downloadable from the Net. This pretty much paralleled UNIX/Linux's experience. I recall Ted charged licenses for his, it didnt have all the necessary pieces, and didnt really understand the exploding InterNet.

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