

Hypertext was intended to compensate for ADD - 10ren
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/3.06/xanadu_pr.html

======
shawndumas
"When handed a lemon, make lemonade" is a good motto. "If it's yellow, make
lemonade" is not. What, then, is the reader to make of this yellow journalism,
"The Curse of Xanadu"? Evocatively written and cunningly constructed, the
piece claims to be the final obituary of all the Xanadu veterans and alumni
(some 50 of us), particularly of myself, charging falsely (amid a fusillade of
personal slurs) that my early work on media design and hypertext was based on
technical "ignorance" and "fantasy."

This article is a very nasty piece of work. Nastiness breathes from the commas
and drips like Spanish moss from Wolf's fine sentences. Everything in the
piece is contrived to promote disapproval rather than understanding. This
hatchet job could be a textbook for a course in persuasive writing: every
word, every detail has been chosen for its connotations of folly, decay, and
despair rather than its accuracy or appropriateness.

The inaccuracies begin in the first sentence (there is no Marin Boulevard in
Sausalito), but I will not chronicle them here; a partial list can be found at
<http://www.xanadu.com.au/ararat>.

Reports of Xanadu's death have been greatly exaggerated. Nowhere did Wolf
mention that "Xanadu" is my own living trademark, now registered and
completely divorced from the software he takes such pains to disparage and
misrepresent. This is a negligent, damaging omission of fact. If that software
is not finished, I will find another way to achieve transclusive literature
and register it under the classical Xanadu trademark.

Wolf makes a big, fat technical claim that sure makes us look stupid: "Even
today, the technology to implement a worldwide Xanadu network does not exist."
Why, how silly of us not to notice - well, dang! - how could we have missed
it? (Strong vapors indeed must I have exhaled to have intoxicated such able
mathematician-generalists as Roger Gregory, Mark Miller, and K. Eric Drexler,
superprogrammer/superbusinessman John Walker, and the rest of the Autodesk
management.)

Since I started in 1960, some type of Xanadu design has always been doable
with the technology of any era. That is because "Xanadu" has always referred
to a specific data service of documents, versions, links, and transclusions -
at whatever speed. The Xanadu Operating Company server that Wolf misrepresents
is simply a re-addressing box, which translates address positions among
virtual documents, versions, links, and transclusions across a distributed,
expandable, address space of contents. The box is designed to supply the
addresses of the desired pieces to the user's front-end machine, which sends
for the pieces and displays them, composited in virtual documents, showing
their interconnections and outreaching connections to other materials. (The
user's front-end machine functions like Mosaic and Netscape, which I believe
were based on our work.)

Actual delivery of the pieces is obviously a problem of a different kind, a
bandwidth problem, subject to more conventional engineering and computer
science. The issue we addressed was addressing itself - virtual addressing in
a hypermedia world, in which everything can be reused and recomposited.

Wolf seriously garbled the idea of transclusion. To say we planned to have
only one copy of anything on the network is ridiculous. There have to be
copies - actually instances - throughout the network and on the user's
machine. A key problem is how to resolve these many instances into a single
virtual object, not troubling the user about their different locations. (Note
the problems caused on the Web by making no distinction between a document's
identity and its address. The result is mirror sites, et cetera.) Literal
copying is not forbidden in a global Xanadu scheme, it is essential; but each
copy retains its original identity and ownership as a remote instance. That is
the point. The different copies have to be functionally united into one
logical identity.

With regard to enfilade technology, Wolf willfully ignores our exact and
careful distinctions in order to make our intentions and claims appear
ridiculous.

I would like a knowledgeable and trustworthy third party to examine our
original 1970 work, under nondisclosure, and publicly verify the novelty of
the work for that time, noting how long thereafter that particular work took
to appear in published literature. To the best of my knowledge, it was well
over a decade, and I have seen no indication that the later work has been
replicated.

Perhaps Wolf talked to people who thought I didn't understand computers
because I wanted things to be very different, and still do; another person's
behavior may seem like ignorance, confusion, or insanity when that person is
simply living in another paradigm. But from the beginning of my work,
proceeding from a basic understanding of how things were in the computer
world, I have wanted them to be different and worked fiercely toward that
goal.

And of course, those Johnny-come-latelys at Xerox PARC and the Media Lab have
treated me as ignorant because my detailed designs and hopes for the media
future have almost nothing to do with theirs.

My ideas may have been too startling and sweeping for many people, but if
those who heard me in the '60s and '70s would examine what I actually said,
rather than what they thought they heard, they would be very surprised. Most
people heard only every other word at best. They heard the thrust and
intensity of my vision but not my exact words; what they heard was based on
their preconceptions, preoccupations, and levels of awareness at the time. And
some were so eager to mishear and put me down that they would mishear and
misremember no matter what.

I continue to hold exactly to my original vision, that transclusive hypermedia
will be the publishing medium of the future, under whatever brand name.

There are far more varieties of interactive media than anyone has yet tried;
but I believe that open transmedia - unique in power to aid understanding and
to solve the copyright issue - represents a vital singularity in the great
family of media cosmologies; until this is disproven, I continue to stake my
life and career on it. If I am right about the centrality of transclusion to
the media of the future, it may all have been worth it, and we will see who
understood media design after all. The ferocity and harsh intent of Wolf's
statement and his varied and repeated assertions of my incompetence and
ignorance, however strange or contorted the charges, require that the magazine
back up these accusations.

I demand that Wolf, and the editors and publishers of Wired, restate their
charges as a testable bill of particulars - open to the judgment of its
readership - regarding my inability to delve, "ignorance of advanced
software," lack of technical knowledge, and absurd notions; insofar as they
may have been material to the clarity, lucidity, grounding, and validity of my
work, ideas, and predictions in the '60s and '70s; specifically identifying
any technical errors, deficiencies, exaggerations, lacunas, false assumptions,
misinterpretations, misunderstandings, shortcomings, fantasies,
hallucinations, and absurd notions as they may be able to exhume, anywhere in
my designs, predictions, published articles, or recorded speeches; whether
leading me to think the wrong thing, or the right thing by mistake, as is so
quaintly averred; so that such defects may be subject to public verification
or disproof; so that we can settle clearly whether my ideas were free-floating
delirium or sound conjecture; whether my continual pursuit of hypermedia
represented a "fantasy" of "ignorance" or a clear deliberate search among
possibilities and alternatives to obstruct my media designs; and whether I was
right for some wrong reasons or whether I was right, period; so that the
degree of damage from these remarkable corkscrew accusations can be properly
assessed.

Wolf calls the general idea that we need freedom and availability of
information to avoid disaster a "very hackerish assumption." Perhaps. But it
is an ideal I believe in, bound up with the ideals I learned from the Pledge
of Allegiance in grade school. Ironically, that ideal seemed to be what Wired
stood for. Wolf's piece is a perfect example of such a disaster. Wolf himself
is indeed an innovator in electronic media. By combining the word processor
and the poison pen, he has created a new electronic literary genre all his
own. But to quote him once more, "In books, television, and radio, the truth
is a slave to a good story, and convincing lies are remembered, while dry,
factual refutations are forgotten." Indeed. Well, I say let us remember
properly. That is the Xanadu ideal.

Theodor Holm Nelson

Project Xanadu

<http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/3.09/rants.html>

~~~
jerf
That's a great link, thanks, but just the link would have done. Failing that
if you're going to paste that much in, please attribute at the top as well as
the bottom; I was very surprised to see that under "shawndumas" until I
finally thought to check the end.

It should also be pointed out this response is from 1995, and I sort of
started writing a half-hearted response but that's just dancing on somebody's
grave at this point.

~~~
shawndumas
The link includes other responses from other people and about other articles
so just the link may have confused people.

As to the attribution; noted -- thanks.

------
marze
It is interesting to note that the problem the Xanadu effort was attacking,
payments for content, etc., is still unsolved.

Newspapers are going out of business because it is difficult to be compensated
for information/content made available over the internet.

It is also interesting to interpret many successful internet firms that offer
blogging, Facebook, as steps towards the Xanadu vision of everything being
editable.

------
cal5k
Has it occurred to anyone that operational transformation, a la Google Wave
(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operational_transformation>), is basically the
solution to the transclusion problem?

------
gruseom
This article is the intellectual equivalent of a horror movie.

