
Xanadu - tosh
http://xanadu.com/
======
mceoin
Xanadu was Ted Nelson's proposed version of a hypertext publishing medium that
predates the World Wide Web. (I believe he coined the term "hypermedia", but I
could be wrong)

It is interesting alternative to "what could have been", and inspired the
imagination of technologists in the 70s (I believe).

It featured some unique elements: \- subdivision of "documents" so that
sections (sentences, paragraphs) can be folded in from other sources. Somewhat
similar to remote CDNs for images, but did chunks of text (e.g. when quoting
another article) \- UI: being able to see multiple documents at the same time
and how they connect to each other. (Not the same as annotation, but if you
can imagine seeing annotations on the side of the screen... something like
that) \- greater similarity to the Memex in how information can be interlinked
and displayed. \- in built royalty mechanism. (Micro payments) \- files are
stored centrally in a docuverse, which is somewhat similar to a block chain in
that there is an agreed interpretation of what a document "is" instead of
having multiple copies of the same document.

Ultimately, the World aside Web came along and filled the need for a document
publishing medium, rendering Xanadu a historical artifact, many of whose ideas
have been realized by other projects in other forms.

Wikipedia entry here:
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu)

Also worth reading is Literary Machines, since that's an interesting
historical read of how people were thinking about uses for computers.

~~~
dustingetz
I read Ted Nelson's autobiography. My impression was he had great visionary
scale ideas, but couldn't describe a concrete implementation. I actively
sought to understand concretely what Xanadu is and came up empty, a lot of
high level words that could mean anything to different people reading them.
Nothing concrete, at least that I was capable of understanding in the amount
of time I was willing to invest. Nelson's research and vision predates
computers and programmers as we know it today, so it makes sense that he
wasn't a programmer. Tim Berners Lee was of course a programmer, and wrote in
Weaving the Web, "having a working demo is table stakes."

~~~
specialist
_"...he had great visionary scale ideas, but couldn't describe a concrete
implementation."_

I revisit Xanadu every couple of years. For its time, its "closed"
architecture seemed reasonable. How else would one implement persistent two-
way links? Once you kinda grasp Xanadu, kludges like pingbacks and link
liveness checkers seem ridiculous.

Alas, Ted Nelson, like myself, didn't anticipate, or was slow to fully
appreciate, how DNS, HTTP, URL/URI would up-end the world. Whatever else was
going on with Nelson, Xanadu, Autodesk, whatever, "the web" tsunami
obliterated competing notions.

Animats' comment (below) about git (eg github) being today's closest
realization of the Xanadu ideal is insightful.

~~~
dustingetz
"its "closed" architecture seemed reasonable. How else would one implement
persistent two-way links"

That's a great example of a concrete implementation detail - unbreakable links
means a central link database - that has significant implications in the shape
of the vision. For example the only way I can think of to do unbreakable links
but also distributed is an immutable public ledger perhaps something like a
blockchain. And now we can talk about specifics like what other properties
does a blockchain implementation shape? What does a database app with HTML
forms and such look like? But did Nelson understand this? Can anyone cite an
implementation source that goes into Nelson's analysis of this stuff?

~~~
abecedarius
Nelson was not a programmer. However, Mark S. Miller told me that he came up
with
[http://e-drexler.com/d/09/00/AgoricsPapers/agoricpapers.html](http://e-drexler.com/d/09/00/AgoricsPapers/agoricpapers.html)
out of thinking about how to architect the full distributed Xanadu system. I
believe Nick Szabo was heavily influenced by Miller's ideas in his first paper
on smart contracts: it references Miller and mentions that Szabo did work for
the company started up to commercialize those ideas (Agorics). It's not
_quite_ a coincidence that you think of blockchains.

I don't know how Xanadu was supposed to work on the inside. I do have a dim
vague memory of seeing a mailing-list post many years later in response to
someone seeking the earliest prior art on using content hashes for a
distributed content-addressable store -- from someone in Xanadu. That's all I
got in my memory. I want to say they also mentioned Merkle trees, but I may be
confabulating. (I'd be surprised if Miller didn't know Merkle personally --
they both worked with Eric Drexler, and Drexler invented his ent just a few
years after Merkle patented his tree.)

Robin Hanson published a paper back then with a non-Xanadu design sketch with
similar goals:
[http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=43938](http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=43938)
but it's paywalled. (Hanson also got involved with Xanadu for a little while.)

------
tmerr

      https://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/FAQ.html
      Q: Do you have had mixed emotions about "cashing in" on the Web?
      A: Not really. It was simply that had the technology been proprietary, and in my total control, it would probably not have taken off. The decision to make the Web an open system was necessary for it to be universal. You can't propose that something be a universal space and at the same time keep control of it.
    

I wonder if this might be closer to the reason that Xanadu didn't take off
than "worse is better". Where is the Xanadu implementation we can hack on,
other than an incomplete dump of code here
[http://udanax.xanadu.com/gold/download/index.html](http://udanax.xanadu.com/gold/download/index.html)
built on a proprietary platform? Why is it that when I look up ZigZag I find
an open source project that closed down over patenting concerns
[http://www.nongnu.org/gzz/](http://www.nongnu.org/gzz/) ?

------
theamk
Every once in a while I see references to Xanadu, as a solution that would fix
all of the problems with current WWW by making broken links impossible. At
some point, I spent some time reading about Xanadu's protocol, and I now think
it would never work at all, since it makes some pretty wide assumptions:

Xanadu assumes that documents are stored on append-only structure: they never
disappear, and instead of updating the document, one just publishes a new
version (with all the text from the previous ones was still available). See
for example
[http://www.xanadu.com.au/ted/XUsurvey/xuDation.html](http://www.xanadu.com.au/ted/XUsurvey/xuDation.html)
figures 9/10 and then figure 16. Later, there is a reference to cache, but
with no details whatsoever: "... content may be cached in many places, as long
as it has the same permanent IDs..."

I have no idea how is this supposed work in the real life. Today, the static
web hosting is dirt cheap, but back in 90's it was $20/mo for just a few
megabytes. In a Xanadu world, what would happen once you no longer pay for
service?

~~~
wmf
The Internet Archive is willing to pay to preserve your content even if you
aren't. One could imagine a system where your hosting fee includes an "archive
tax" that pays for your content to be archived forever.

In general, I get the impression that Xanadu was designed for a world run by
five mainframes and it was never really able to adapt to the Internet.

------
bobsgame
I think Xanadu is great and it will be one of those things that proves itself
in the future. Perhaps whatever replaces the web someday will resemble it.

I bet that someday we will move to a distributed web hosted on something like
the blockchain, with redundancy and revision history, and that will begin to
resemble Xanadu. It reminds me of sort of a "Star Trek" vision of how things
should be, but not how things actually are in this disorganized world.

I think that it's sort of like the Dynabook or early AI or VR, in that it's
the correct vision of the ideal result of a technology, but was way too ahead
of its time and the technology just wasn't ready.

------
Edmond
Depending on who you're talking to, it is either a revolutionary idea
misunderstood or a massive case of vaporware:

[https://www.wired.com/1995/06/xanadu/](https://www.wired.com/1995/06/xanadu/)

~~~
SBG11
"Nelson invented a new way of crossing the street: when arriving at a busy
thoroughfare, he would dramatically turn his back on traffic and step with
theatrical nonchalance off the sidewalk. Drivers, frightened, would slam on
their brakes."

Well, there's that.

~~~
qubex
” _Eyes On The Road_ ” might've been a reasonable assumption in the day before
smartphones, but nowadays I'd advise against literally betting your life on
it.

------
nyolfen
see also: As We May Think (1945) --
[https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-
we-m...](https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-may-
think/303881/)

discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4577865](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4577865)

------
pdfernhout
Ted Nelson got the name Xanadu from a short story by Theodore Sturgeon from
1956 called "The Skills of Xanadu". (I asked Ted about it when he visited IBM
Research around 2000...)

Printed:
[https://archive.org/stream/galaxymagazine-1956-07/Galaxy_195...](https://archive.org/stream/galaxymagazine-1956-07/Galaxy_1956_07#page/n117/mode/2up)

Audio: [https://archive.org/details/pra-
BB3830.08](https://archive.org/details/pra-BB3830.08)

"The story tells of a representative of the expansionist, imperialistic
culture of the planet Kit Carson, and his encounter with the deceptively
pastoral culture of Xanadu."

The story is about the social effect of wearable networked computers that can
exchange knowledge -- very prescient for 1956!

------
EvanAnderson
If you're curious about Ted Nelson, check out his Youtube channel:
[https://www.youtube.com/user/TheTedNelson/videos](https://www.youtube.com/user/TheTedNelson/videos)

His "Computers for Cynics" series was entertaining to me. He's a sharp guy
with strong opinions and an engaging speaker.

He doesn't post a lot and I see that I have some catching-up to do.

I didn't realize he just turned 80 a few weeks ago. I'll be interested to see
the videos of the "Ted's 80th birthday show" at The Internet Archive.

------
sitkack
Free Creative Commons, "Intertwingled: The Work and Influence of Ted Nelson"

[https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-319-16925-5](https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-319-16925-5)

------
robin_reala
It must have been painful to write a website for Xanadu.

~~~
paulddraper
Though websites are written for the web.

------
Chiba-City
Ted Nelson's Computer Lib/Dream Machines was absolutely essential to drawing
me into the software industry. It's entertaining and inspiring. Everyone
should have fun sharing it. That book reached tons of nerds playing with
terminals, phones, TV monitors, programmable calculators and modems.

------
peteretep
Upvoted in the hope someone will explain this to me

~~~
occultist_throw
Long and short of it, it's a form of bidirectional links (so if you update one
side, the other side automatically updates). This prevents link-rot.

The second is putting a payment processor on EVERY query. You want Internet
for the Richies- this is how you get it. Of course, there's hand-wavey garbage
that says 'everyone would contribute and nobody would owe anyone anything'.

Seriously, IPFS is the best way forward here. Links never change its content
(but can still die if noone has the content). And no payment processor is
there unless you want to pay other people to pin (read: seed) content.

(To see this post, please pay $0.02)

Edit: Seriously? multiple -1's in a row? I'd love to hear rebuttals if I'm
wrong, or a further discussion. If you've read the Xanadu documents, then
you'd know that the basis of this is a "Secure Environment and Secure
Identification" of computers. AKA: DRM.

~~~
pavlov
_> Internet for the Richies_

Isn't that what we effectively have, with so much of the Internet's value
either locked in Facebook's garden or beholden to Google?

I understand where you're coming from with the DRM criticism, but IMO the
primary fault in Xanadu's version is that it's an attempt at naïve mom&pop
capitalism in a digital world that already is owned by plutocrats wealthy and
powerful beyond Rockefellers' dreams.

~~~
jancsika
> Isn't that what we effectively have, with so much of the Internet's value
> either locked in Facebook's garden or beholden to Google?

No, because you can download the entirety of Wikipedia, including its edit
history and discussion.

Also, you can download a not insignificant number of primary sources through
both sci-hub and various other sources like Project Gutenberg, IMSLP, etc.

Add to that all the things that swell to prominence on Bittorrent trackers
whenever the Streisand effect is in play.

I have a hard time seeing that content disappearing any time soon. But I also
have a hard time seeing how that content would have been aggregated in the
first place if you had little micropayment barriers between all the things.

~~~
occultist_throw
When I was much younger and more naive about how the US and capitalism works,
I thought that it would be a splendid idea to be able to make money on my
thoughts, experiments, and doings. And I thought that it too would be a great
idea to be able to leverage others' works, pay them, and build on them.

And now, I do just that. Except there's no money changing hands. That's open
source for you. Now, if Xanadu's ideas did come to fruition, then I would
expect everything to have a paywall on it. And the worst/regular experience
would be pages of pages of aggregate sentences, with each few words being a
cent or 2. The pages themselves would be >$1 each to download. Instead of
trying to trick browsers and people into spyware - it would be tricking people
into automatic slow-reloading links that would cost a few cents... And would
continuously reload treating unsuspecting users like a piggy bank.

Instead, the world we have is free by default. Only if something is deemed to
cost a lot is there a paywall. Things under that threshold use advertising,
which is slowly beginning to fail at the seams. That's because content is
expensive, but copying isnt.

(BTW, my points on the main post are still yoyo-ing around 0 and 1. I wish
people would respond rather than try to hide my commentary.)

------
jstewartmobile
I corresponded briefly with him about this. From my understanding, his goals
were:

* micropayments for authors * immutable revision history * persistent bi-directional links * _transclusions_ (quotes connected to the original source) instead of copies

Judging from "Computer Lib / Dream Machines," he obviously knows his stuff. I
suspect he just doesn't like programming.

I think his biggest problem was that a lot of his goals were too big for the
technology of the time. Even with distributed version control, blockchains,
and cloud computing we're not there yet, but we are closer than we were.

------
odammit
Did anyone else click on the random period in the bottom left corner hoping it
was one of those old school secret links to the "admin" section?

------
sisbell
The Xanadu design of Ted and Roger (and others) is actually quite good. To
understand, it does require a lot of reading (and rereading) sources like
'Literary Machines' and the online docs out there. I had to build and run
Udanax Green to figure out areas the docs didn't cover.

Now the question is "Is the design feasible to scale?" I'm working toward
building a xanalogical system using Udanax Green as a design reference and
after 9 months of working on it, I'm convinced the design will scale.

I'm using RDF backend store for the links/endsets. SPARQL/RDF is easily
distributed so there is no need to centralize. I'm using IPFS for images.

I'm currently working on a custom browser for viewing, publishing and editing.

There is still a lot to do but you can check it the source.
[https://github.com/sisbell/oulipo](https://github.com/sisbell/oulipo)

------
ComputerGuru
The site is down for me, possibly due to load (the request just times out).

Off-topic: Did anyone else sit down to watch Citizen Kane, purportedly the
best movie ever, and come out of the experience ridiculously underwhelmed?

~~~
parenthephobia
Citizen Kane practically invented modern dramatic film.

The techniques Welles developed for Kane were innovative at the time, but are
now mundane or clichéd. In terms of writing, framing, lighting, directing,
editing, scoring, it was unparalleled.

It's not the best movie in the conventional sense, and maybe not even a
particularly good one - I found that the story itself failed to grip me - but
it is _technically_ brilliant, and one of the most significant movies in terms
of its influence on the art of film-making.

I don't remember the source, but there's a quote to the effect of "I don't
think much of Shakespeare's plays, they're just one cliché after another".

~~~
skore
AKA "Seinfeld Is Unfunny"
[http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SeinfeldIsUnfunny](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SeinfeldIsUnfunny)

------
hyporthogon
Detailed (albeit 2009) review of Ted Nelson's influence:
[https://nccur.lib.nccu.edu.tw/bitstream/140.119/57633/1](https://nccur.lib.nccu.edu.tw/bitstream/140.119/57633/1)

------
fiatjaf
So this could be an app, or a new browser, maybe.

~~~
ZenoArrow
You wouldn't need an app or new browser, this could be done using the semantic
web technologies that already exist.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web)

~~~
fiatjaf
Yes, but you would need an app or browser to navigate through all that mess.

~~~
ZenoArrow
Not necessarily, you could navigate through websites.

~~~
fiatjaf
Like you already do today?

~~~
ZenoArrow
Semantic web technologies are not very common today. You couldn't easily
implement Xanadu-like content linking in a web browser without using semantic
web technologies.

~~~
fiatjaf
Are you trying to confuse me?

~~~
ZenoArrow
No, I'm not trying to confuse you.

To start again, what do you think I mean by the term 'semantic web'? If you're
not sure, I'm happy to try and explain.

------
mcs_
Did someone remember the movie?

~~~
mastax
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xanadu_(Citizen_Kane)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xanadu_\(Citizen_Kane\))

Huge, foolish, excess. Once completed, unable to give it's creator happiness.
Not a perfect metaphor, but it gets you thinking.

OT, but Kane is definitely worth watching. Probably enjoy it more if you don't
go in to it expecting "the greatest film ever".

~~~
moron4hire
You don't think they meant the Olivia Newton John vehicle?
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xanadu_(film)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xanadu_\(film\))

