
Roads to Xanadu - MaysonL
http://www.bradford-delong.com/2015/11/xanadu-conversation-on-2015-06-29-with-alexis-hope-of-fold-what-i-would-prioritize-markdown-engine-for-text-car.html
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kristopolous
I worked with him for a while. The most frustrating part is that he wants
Xanadu to be a closed-source, for-profit, 1988 style piece of capitalist
software with potentially, maybe, open standards.

The content he wants to be DRM'd through micropayments and all for-profit with
fine-tuned rights and fees for attributions etc.

Also things like multi-phasic design where you do 80% and then the other 20%
is a non-starter. He wants a waterfall-model cathedral or nothing at all.

So I really wanted to work more with him but he couldn't get that no matter
how awesome (it involves a file that maintains binary offset pointers to
another file WITHOUT a source file that generates both so yes, you append to
byte 1 and then you need to ROLL YOUR OWN tool to change the offsets in the
offsets file - oh yeah, they're also in a binary format), because of it's
systemic structure, he was effectually just proposing another proprietary
locked-down format that won't go anywhere and was imposing a structure that
will ONLY lead to one-off proof-of-concepts and prototypes.

Which is exactly what we've seen. For 50 years. I have a VM with demos in
Java, TCL, and many other bygone languages written by people like myself. I
remember saying:

"There's a deeper structural reason why the web uses HTML and not Microsoft
DOC as its language."

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Animats
Everything is pay per view in Xanadu. That's the problem.

It's also why it attracts economists and developers of the libertarian
persuasion.

I met the Xanadu crowd during the period Autodesk was funding them. They were
building a cross between Wikipedia and GitHub, with micropayments. Any
subscriber could create a new document based on old ones. Readers of the new
document paid to view it, and payments were apportioned between the
contributors.

They had no idea how to distribute this beyond one machine. The rigid
bidirectional linking system in Xanadu required everything to be kept in sync,
and it all had to be under central control so the micropayments would be paid.

They also had to deal with the dead weight of Ted Nelson's database design,
with "tumblers" and "zipper lists". It wasn't a good way to architect a
database. Everything was explicitly cross-linked. Today, we know to separate
the indices from the data, which all SQL databases do. You can create and
rebuild indices as needed in an SQL database. If you need backlinks, you can
create an index to do that. This separation of content from index makes the
problem much simpler.

If you wanted to implement Xanadu today, it wouldn't be that hard to do it on
top of an SQL database. (That's how Wikipedia works.) What Xanadu was supposed
to do isn't all that complicated by modern standards.

Xanadu didn't do images. Nelson was into text. Xanadu had no image capability
at all. (Video and audio storage were too expensive to even consider at the
time.)

As computing became cheaper, Xanadu became unnecessary.

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joelg
For those unfamiliar with Xanadu or Ted Nelson,
[http://www.wired.com/1995/06/xanadu/](http://www.wired.com/1995/06/xanadu/)
is a great read. People who criticize it for being the "largest piece of
vaporware in history" are technically correct, but rarely understand its
potential or scope because we're so used to the current paradigm that it's
hard to picture anything being better than "the way it is".

~~~
jacquesm
Ted Nelson made only one mistake: he waited too long to release it so the web
could steal both his thunder _and_ the market right out from under him. If
he'd released it when it was first close to usable it would have overran the
world, the web as we know it today would have never gotten off the ground.

The structures in Xanadu are extremely powerful and well thought out but the
web is 'good enough' and so here we are today.

The best you can do is to take the lessons and interesting bits from Xanadu
and evaluate whether or not there is a way to graft them onto the web.

There is an interesting parallel between Gnu (the OS) and Linux on the one
hand the Xanadu and the WWW on the other.

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bascule
I've been meaning to blog about Xanadu myself. Nice to see it being talked
about.

