This is the most ridiculous recurring accusation against someone who has championed the human-oriented use of computers since day one and it's partly his work that means we have PCs at all. So, firstly, Ted can program, secondly, there are versions of Xanadu and ZigZag you can download and try.
I've never seen any indication that Ted has implemented any of his own projects. ZigZag's first demo appears to have been built by Andrew Pam, and a later Java implementation was done by some others.[1]
The page for the Xanadu demo a sibling comment mentions says "The enthusiastic and talented programmer, Rob Smith, of Manchester England, did a beautiful job combining a lot of our ideas" but "Unfortunately this made it a very complicated package, eventually too tangled to improve further, and Rob had to get on to other things. John Ohno and Jonathan Kopetz, in Connecticut, spent several years trying to refactor it, but it's beyond fixing" [2]. I read this as 1) someone implemented a demo for Ted, 2) some other people tried to fix it but gave up, but 3) there's no sign of Ted actually doing any of the work.
If there's proof Ted has actually implemented his own ideas in the past, I'll retract my criticism and refrain from posting it further. I certainly don't argue that the man has been influential, in any case!
Ted's needlessly authoritarian on implementation details, down to very specific details in file formats and how the components interact with each other using protocols that simply do not work.
For instance, he was insisting on ASCII only, byte addressed implementation of a cross referencing system with me in 2014 for the Xanadu implementation you mentioned. I couldn't convince him that multibyte encoding systems were worth considering or that offsets would change leading to fundamental data inconsistencies, thus corrupting formats...the rabbit hole gets deep. He gets very opinionated on details that don't matter and frankly don't work.
Thus it could only ever be a demo because you can't just feed open formats from the open internet it in any dynamic organic way. Everything would have to be curated, filtered, and babysat. That's not memex, that's some digital form of Pearson publishing with some proprietary e-reading system. Which is fine, but TBLs W3 system of intentionally leaving things open ended so every step becomes a potential platform for the next is somuchdramatically better then just a cathedral cross referential monolith hybrid of hypercard and pdf. The brilliance of TBL is the W3 is half assed in just the right ways to make it not yet another unused visual language or mind map format. Should more be done? Sure, of course.
You may think it sounds absurd that Ted thinks there will be manual publishing under some private company's direction in the new format and not automated machine transliteration, I agree, it sounds like an archaic museum piece at the living computer museum in Seattle and not a future oriented system of thought. Well here we are anyway.
He needs to cede ground and intentionally leave pieces open ended so that other groups, in other cultures, with other priorities can fit in their specialized pieces into the puzzle. He apparently is still unwilling.
He's a brilliant philosopher but a classically toxic engineer. Usually that second group is full of people with bad ideas. His are undoubtedly revolutionary and profound, but the delegation of other thought systems to other humans and then interacting with them is like Drucker management 101 and he's just not onboard.
Also, without going into detail Andrew is a backstabbing ass. I hope he reads this and I'll state that publicly.
PS: In case Ted sees this (he probably still doesn't browse hn, but he gets forwarded things), I love you, you know this. You know my criticisms comes from a desire to make the acts as revolutionary as the thought and I want it to happen as much as you do. Hope to hear from you and hope all is well.
I got this file: http://xanadu.com/xuspD9y,2013 which is a .zip file.
So it's ~7years old, Windows only (though full of _MACOSX files). Keyboard only. No installer. No source available. Described as "spent several years trying to refactor it, but it's beyond fixing"
But yeah it does run on my laptop, at least! Any other versions out there?
Bill Lowe of IBM fame on Ted; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kasu0BhRFGo
A zigzag demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6yFcJXBMGQQ
Finally, the man is 82, and deserving of respect, not some flippant, inaccurate, badly argued and frankly idiotic comment.