
Project Xanadu - shortlived
http://www.xanadu.net/
======
zorpner
Always interesting to see Xanadu bubble back up. This Wired profile from 1995
(!) is required reading on the history of the project:
[https://www.wired.com/1995/06/xanadu/](https://www.wired.com/1995/06/xanadu/)

~~~
jdougan
And this, Ted's response, is also required reading.
[http://xanadu.com.au/ararat](http://xanadu.com.au/ararat)

~~~
xjay
Related: On April 15, 2019, Ted Nelson published a video on Youtube with the
title 'Pre-Final Reply to "The Curse of Xanadu" by Gary Wolf / Gory Jackal'
[1]

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_-5cGEU9S0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_-5cGEU9S0)

------
dang
Alan Kay on Ted Nelson:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AnrlSqtpOkw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AnrlSqtpOkw)

Steve Wozniak on Ted Nelson:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gl0Wfs70rV4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gl0Wfs70rV4)

------
Waterluvian
Awful landing page for what seems to be a rather neat idea. Once I dug in and
figured out what Xanadu actually is about, I like it a lot.

~~~
crankylinuxuser
"This post cost you $.02 to download and read"

^^ this is the crux of "project xanadu". They wanted a copyright money
speedometer to assess every possible transaction. And there was a promise that
individuals would have things to say that would go viral as well.

I'm glad we got the 'default free' internet, rather than paywall hell for
everything.

~~~
anotheryou
it's much more than just micro-payments

~~~
teddyh
Micropayments are bad enough, there’s no need to go into more details.

~~~
anotheryou
I think they are an afterthought on the attribution/quoting mechanism. It's
very well worth to look at the rest too.

After all it's about the Idea, not the decision to use this specific product
(as it's still not in a usable state as far as I can tell).

------
Animats
Previously on Hacker News, only 4 months ago.[1]

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18635123](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18635123)

------
sbmassey
So to summarise, from what I can gather by browsing the various links, it is
essentially the web but with a built in payment system for document
publishers, and mechanisms for publishing new documents using sections of
existing documents. What did I miss?

~~~
theamk
The links never go bad because you should never delete data. Also old versions
are kept forever.

~~~
crististm
How do you reconcile this with the reality of systems breaking?

To make it work then you just can't rule out by fiat a hard-disk breakage as
one of the simplest adversarial conditions to the model.

~~~
theamk
Presumably by replicating extensively? How this was supposed to work in 1960
tech (and storage prices), I have no idea.

Xanadu is full of missing pieces like this one. There is a reason it never
took off.

------
patneedham
As a resident of New Jersey, I initially thought this was going to be
something poking fun at the never-ending construction project formerly known
as "Xanadu":
[https://www.nj.com/bergen/2018/06/american_dream_how_did_a_s...](https://www.nj.com/bergen/2018/06/american_dream_how_did_a_swath_of_land_in_the_mead.html)

~~~
WalterGR
There are several other options, if we’re discussing what this post isn’t
about.

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

------
shalabhc
Ted Nelson recently did a series of videos on the important ideas in Xanadu.
Start here:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hMKy52Intac](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hMKy52Intac)

Also you can buy his classic 'Computer Lib' book here:
[https://computerlibbook.com/](https://computerlibbook.com/)

------
floren
The thing which always puzzled me about Xanadu is that all the attempted
implementations seem to have been written by other people. Drawing from
Wikipedia:

* "In 1972, Cal Daniels completed the first demonstration version of the Xanadu software on a computer Nelson had rented for the purpose

* "While at Autodesk, the group, led by Gregory, completed a version of the software, written in the C programming language"

* "Then a newer group of programmers [at Autodesk] used the problems with this software as justification to rewrite the software in Smalltalk"

From the Xanadu website, regarding their demo XanaduSpace: "The enthusiastic
and talented programmer, Rob Smith, of Manchester England, did a beautiful job
combining a lot of our ideas [...] John Ohno and Jonathan Kopetz, in
Connecticut, spent several years trying to refactor it, but it's beyond
fixing-- though as a demo it works just fine."

The related ZigZag project: "The first prototype consisting of two character-
graphical views was implemented as a Perl module by Andrew Pam in 1997", and
there's a more current implementation by some other people(
[https://sourceforge.net/p/gzigzag/_members/](https://sourceforge.net/p/gzigzag/_members/))
called GZigZag

If I had been trying for NEARLY 60 YEARS to get a software project out the
door, I would have probably started trying to code it myself after the first
decade or so! Every time Xanadu comes up, I'm consistently puzzled at how
there's never any sign of Nelson actually doing the grunt work of
implementation!

Edit: here's an interesting link from the ZigZag wikipedia page, where a
GZigZag implementor talks about their experience ([http://lambda-the-
ultimate.org/node/233#comment-1715](http://lambda-the-
ultimate.org/node/233#comment-1715)):

> The GZigZag project did not materialize Ted's dream system as fast as he
> liked, so he withdrew his support. At first it just meant that he wasn't
> participating in discussions as much as he used to. At some later time he
> asserted his trademark (he had earlier given his permission to use it), and
> we changed the name to Gzz. Around the same time I was burning out,
> partially due to Ted's distrust and a large part due to project internal
> chemistry problems. I bailed out on the project in the end of 2002.

> Some time after my departure from the project, Ted asserted his ZigZag
> patent. The project was forced to abandon all ZigZag related stuff; it was
> reformed as Fenfire by salvaging those innovations that were not inseparably
> linked to ZigZag and using RDF as the new core. I hear that's not the last
> bit of trouble from outside parties the project has run to, but I cannot
> discuss even the little that I know in public. Suffice to say that even
> Tuomas burned out on the project eventually.

~~~
jbottoms
You omitted the first browser, Silversmith. From Wikipedia, "History of the
Browser": "Another early browser, Silversmith, was created by John Bottoms in
1987.[9] The browser, based on SGML tags,[10] used a tag set from the
Electronic Document Project of the AAP with minor modifications and was sold
to a number of early adopters. At the time SGML was used exclusively for the
formatting of printed documents.[11] The use of SGML for electronically
displayed documents signaled a shift in electronic publishing and was met with
considerable resistance. Silversmith included an integrated indexer, full text
searches, hypertext links between images text and sound using SGML tags and a
return stack for use with hypertext links. It included features that are still
not available in today's browsers. These include capabilities such as the
ability to restrict searches within document structures, searches on indexed
documents using wild cards and the ability to search on tag attribute values
and attribute names."

Silversmith implemented a portion of Ted's vision and I have discussed it with
him from time to time. Ted developed Hypertext fixed links for books and we
extended that to Hypertext links across the Internet, along with returns to
multiple sources which was not done in books.

I was not able to get funding to continue the work. TimBL's innovation was in
1.) soliciting funding from the 10 large companies that funded the Web, and
2.) embedding advertising on web pages and in the content. But along with this
was the funder's specification of how the WWW should work.

My descriptions of Silversmith were removed from wikipedia at W3c's request
and Silversmith is now conveniently a "precursor" and most people believe
Netscape was the first, when in fact it was released about 8 years after
Silversmith The government was the early adopter and we released 4 different
browsers in the first year, the last of which was a semantic browser for the
U.S. Army Material Command. Silversmith included a browse-able index of each
document, automatic markup of submitted texts, a parser to automatically check
the page composition and it was a distributed system. The 5th browser was
Erwise,
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erwise](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erwise),
which Tim looked at before he started on his browser, the W3c implementation
(the 6th). He declined to pursue it because the comments in the code were
written in Finnish. Our other browsers were for the DoD Computer Aided
Logistics Support (CALS) documents, for DoD Tech Manuals, and one for Old
Norse documents written in Old Norse.I designed the browser to aid in the
development of ontologies for AI. We have been working in the field for 33
years. My hope is that our next browser will include Ted's vision of draft
versions and payments.

~~~
hedora
Are there any links to silvesmith resources? It sounds pretty amazing, and it
would be nice if it were written down somewhere. I’d be curious to see what
was forgotten along the way to v6.

Also, I see the Erwise Wikipedia screenshot uses the phrase “world wide web”
in the authors box, which is kinda funny, since the article goes on to say Tim
Berners Lee later invented the world wide web.

------
chadcmulligan
Leo Laporte interviews ted nelson in 2014 [https://twit.tv/shows/twit-
bits/episodes/199](https://twit.tv/shows/twit-bits/episodes/199)

------
hindsightRegret
The longest-lived vaporware in history

~~~
inetsee
I wouldn't necessarily label it as vaporware, but I would call it the most
disappointing great idea in the history of computing.

~~~
minxomat
A similar thing happened with Chiron:
[http://maf.directory/misc/chiron.html](http://maf.directory/misc/chiron.html)

Quote from Donald Knuth for context: "[Floyd] was destined to be disappointed
that his dream of a new, near-ideal programming language called Chiron was
never to be realized--possibly because he was reluctant to make the sorts of
compromises that he saw me making with respect to TEX. Chiron was "an attempt
to provide a programming environment in which, to the largest extent possible,
one designs a program by designing the process which the program carries out."
His plans for the Chiron compiler included novel methods of compile-time error
recovery and type matching that have never been published."

------
NikkiA
I wonder if Herzog's list of 'sane people in computing' would have jumped to 2
had he met Terry Davis.

