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What has been released so far is a tease. It demonstrates nicely the transclusion and transcopyright concepts. For it to be truly useful it needs the ability to make your own documents with the ability to charge micropayments. Even then it will take awhile before people start to use it, but once it hits critical mass, it will be a solid alternative for publishing. Much better than the web. A global publishing system based on transclusions and micropayments would even things out -- and put serious but smaller scale publishing in the hands of ordinary people. The power would not be concentrated among the worlds most popular web sites and our culture would be less subverted by the need to advertise to pay the bills.

What hasn't been shone in the docs well is what the authoring tools will be like. The better the authoring tools, the better the adoption of this software. Ted Nelson wants something called "real cut and paste". This is simply slicing and dicing a document into pieces and rearranging them. Astonishing that no software today can do this. So software today will even allow you to draw sentences around. Freeplane, a mind-mapping program, comes to doing real cut-and-paste. Rearranging text like you rearrange text in a mind-mapping program would be best accomplished on a 4K monitor, although dual HD monitors would do. Cut-and-paste as it is today is more like hide-and-plug -- the text is temporarily taken off the screen and put into a new place.

Give the Xanadu project its due. It is still relevant today and needed. And while the Xanadu project is Ted's big idea ... he has others as well. I particularly like his Floating World(tm) spec. I myself have been working towards creating part of this Floating World idea in my spare time (development has been slow, oh well). Though I want to get the photo organizer and checklist software parts done first. If the programmers on this latest attempt at Xanadu succeed they may beat me to getting around to the Floating World ideas (although of course not quite as laid out in the old design). If so, I am OK with that.

Project Xanadu has been very well documented and pretty much mined out for prior art. It was not sitting around under a tarp in someone's garage for 54 years, nor did it suddenly spring into being today.

well, he could have gone to late middle ages and suggest that patenting book printing would be an immensely good thing so they could use the licensing money to provide free paper for poor people to do basic research on.

he'd still be an idiot. just adding _any_ micro payments, or licensing to arrange for isp's per user or per page view or per hosted page or any model you can think of then that would have meant that we would be using some Microsoft HyperLibrary or IBM DataLinkServerFormat or something as silly and not the simple to use, easy to adapt protocols that made web what it is now - sure, a "lot more money" would have gone to research of whoever would have won that bid.

in the purest essence the guy thinks that more taxation == more research. fuck him, fuck his wipo. there's some group think for you.

oh and interestingly the comments on the article lead me to google to find this: http://www.aus.xanadu.com/general/future.html which is what stupid guys in a committee would come up with and actually think they could make it work(basically it seems like www with strict authoring and enforced micropayments - and a huge money grab attempt at making an impractical world wide web, sure, their version would be like the wipo version and _only_ work in a fantasy world or in a world where you would have 7 out of 10 people enforcing just that system with _violence_).

After looking at the Xanadu Website, I see why he thinks the WWW is wrong. Hey, 1998 called and wants its geocities site back!

Correction, what Xanadu "is" ;)

http://www.xanadu.com/

It's basically an MDI for browsing where links open horrizontally and scroll with the page. It's a clugy attempt at what he is talking about.

-Rick

I'm unsure as to what the modern library will be like, or even if it will have a physical public location - though I hope they maintain that part. My ideal library would have a number of advanced technologies incorporated - from Tagging and print on demand books to Virtual Reality education and highend computer modelling/simulation software.

Ted should never be forgotten, especially now when we need something like transclusion more than ever. However, Ted seems to have wandered back into academia, and progress on Xanadu and its associated technologies seems to have ground to a halt.

[The Web is] the standard we ended up adopting mainly because, like so much else in the technology field, it was in the right place at the right time.

Nah, it's the standard we adopted because it was the first online hypertext system to understand an important point: that "Good Enough, Now" is better than "Perfect, Later".

Xanadu was/is an attempt to design a Perfect Hypertext System: one in which the architecture prevents links from ever breaking, updates to a document flow out to linked documents, and so forth. From the Xanadu perspective the Web is intolerably fragile.

The problem was that to get to that Perfect Hypertext System you had to solve a number of incredibly difficult problems. Just take that issue of "links never break", for starters; read over Nelson's explanation of "enfilades" to get a sense for the amount of architecture required to solve this one problem.

The key insight Berners-Lee and the WWW brought to the table was that it was OK to not try and solve every problem. The WWW doesn't try to prevent you from doing things that break the system; if you do, it just throws an error, and it's up to you to notice and fix it. When you get over trying to provide "unbreakable links" you can make creating links as simple as providing a string that points to the location of a document. And that makes the WWW a system that is very easy to get started with.

Berners-Lee's system wasn't particularly elegant but it was Good Enough, and it did the limited amount of things it claimed to do. It Worked. Even after decades of hacking, Nelson's system has never managed to escape the realm of theory. It may be Perfect, but if you give people something that works today, very few will be willing to wait for perfection.

[The Web is] the standard we ended up adopting mainly because, like so much else in the technology field, it was in the right place at the right time.

Nah, it's the standard we adopted because it was the first online hypertext system to understand an important point: that "Good Enough, Now" is better than "Perfect, Later".

Xanadu was/is an attempt to design a Perfect Hypertext System: one in which the architecture prevents links from ever breaking, updates to a document flow out to linked documents, and so forth. From the Xanadu perspective the Web is intolerably fragile.

The problem was that to get to that Perfect Hypertext System you had to solve a number of incredibly difficult problems. Just take that issue of "links never break", for starters; read over Nelson's explanation of "enfilades" to get a sense for the amount of architecture required to solve this one problem.

The key insight Berners-Lee and the WWW brought to the table was that it was OK to not try and solve every problem. The WWW doesn't try to prevent you from doing things that break the system; if you do, it just throws an error, and it's up to you to notice and fix it. When you get over trying to provide "unbreakable links" you can make creating links as simple as providing a string that points to the location of a document. And that makes the WWW a system that is very easy to get started with.

Berners-Lee's system wasn't particularly elegant but it was Good Enough, and it did the limited amount of things it claimed to do. It Worked. Even after decades of hacking, Nelson's system has never managed to escape the realm of theory. It may be Perfect, but if you give people something that works today, very few will be willing to wait for perfection.

http://www.xanadu.com/

Tim Berners-Lee's HTML (which not coincidentally uses Ted's term "hypertext") implemented a small subset of Ted's vision. It was of course based on SGML, the offspring of GML, which was also created by a US national, Charles Goldfarb.

http://www.sgmlsource.com/history/roots .htm

the Web is pretty much what he was predicting.

Except that the world wide web is mostly read-only. Bush envisioned a system where you could annotate the text. This is also what Berners-Lee wanted: more collaboration. We're only beginning to get that with wikis.

Xanadu is / was a system that did this (and was founded in 1960). It has some things that could be very useful (like a micropayment system).

A single word Xanadu the father of actual web.

I watched the "progress" of Xanadu (later renamed Open Transmedia) from a large-ish distance for some 15 years. Nelson's central idea of "transclusion" -- to seamlessly and dynamically incorporate, within your work, any segment from any version of any other work (which itself may incorporate transclusions) -- was and still is very interesting. The World-Wide Web doesn't even begin to approach the power and flexibility of Nelson's model.

But always present within Nelson's talks was this pernicious issue of royalties. The person who writes an original work and places it on the Open Transmedia network could demand to receive a royalty every time someone read it, or when transcluded segments of it were read, as part of another document. When you take into account that transclusions can themselves contain transclusions, with no nesting limit or limits against circular references, it's easy to see that the billing algorithms and infrastructure alone was effectively an insoluble problem. The intractibility of the problem, along with Nelson's adamance on the point, is what kept me from investigating Open Transmedia more closely. I had always felt that, if Nelson had simply dropped the royalty "requirement", Open Transmedia would have become a hell of a lot simpler, and it might exist today.

The other thing that held Xanadu back was Nelson's persistent refusal to demonstrate what he claimed he had working in the lab. As near as I can tell (which is another way of my saying, "This is a wild guess"), Nelson hoped to earn money from patents on Xanadu's mechanisms and implementation, and feared early disclosure would reveal enough that potential rivals would be able to hack together a competing implementation before his system was complete. (Not an unreasonable position to take, especially given Microsoft's history of crufting together half-assed clone products and rushing them out the door to gain market share.) Despite what he may have had working in the lab, the popular perception gradually became that he had nothing.

Writing is Nelson's principal vocation, so it's easy to see why the issue of royalties and compensation was so important to him. It's my opinion that, had he been a bit more altruistic in Open Transmedia's design, it would exist today, and the Web would be a much more flexible, powerful medium.

Understand that this is solely my opinion, based largely on the relatively coarse, sporadic information I've collected over the years. There's a hell of a lot more detail here which I freely admit I'm missing.

By the way, Nelson hasn't been completely idle since Xanadu. Check out ZigZag sometime. You will either find it intensely fascinating, or completely confusing (I myself often zig-zag between the two views when thinking about ZigZag).

Schwab

If broken links are a problem, maybe the html/http pair would better be shaped more acording the original Xanadu project.http://xanadu.com/

In my view (and for lack of a better term to describe it) the first step is to 'assimilate' information from the web as opposed to indexing it. What is involved here is to identify the key concepts in relation to other key concepts. These relationships are largely interdiciplinary in nature. And as we see ideas explored on the web we can almost describe an evolutionary progression, where one thought leads to another.

PageRank is a little over simplified in that it counts the links, but des not actually qualify the conceptual relationships between the ideas themselves. Another issue is who the source and destination of links are. When little Jimmy is doing his pinewood derby racecar website and links to the Indy 500 website, shouldn't that link be weighted differently than that of collaborating (or confilicting) points of view among top rated experts in a field? I'm not saying that important conceptual links can't come from unusual places; but it is less likely.

One problem is that the structure of links on the web is, as you describe, 'dumb.' While I'm not in 100% agreement with him, Ted Nelson's Xanadu gives us an alternative to how things might be done.

From my perspective a smart link might actually have it's own embedded search rules and biases, and be 'free standing,' i.e. not statically linked at any one time, but able to generate links from an indexing database based on the criteria present when it is invoked; because smart links have to be aware of both the user's needs and the conceptual framework rules. When coupled with an instructional objective (for example) a smart link (in a smart browser) can help to distinguish between what the end user knows (can be demonstrated) and areas which they don't understand, and modify the weights of items in the search to 'direct' the user towards the concept they don't get through related ideas that they do understand (much as we are doing here.)

Ted Nelson's ZigZag system is a new way to store related data without resorting to a relational database. At first glance, it seems really goofy. This is usually an indication (to me, anyway) that it either really is completely goofy, or brilliant beyond my comprehension. Given Nelson's record, I'm inclined toward the latter.

Schwab

Xanadu was the first system for reverse linkable, micropayment ready, Super-HTML system.

It was set up originally to help content manufacturers so they could choose how much to reimburse their goods with. You could choose free, if you wanted.

Bandwidth still costs no matter what, so this could at least pay for bandwidth. And who WOULDNT pay .0002 cents for accesses to debian mirrors? I certainly would IF IT WAS EASY.

Xanadu also provided for searchable media: An mpeg movie is linked from IMBD to a section of frame 23508-24003 on the movie servers. The content people then would access a porportinate cost to that snippet. Who wouldnt agree to pay 4cents for that access?

And now for those whining that that network wouldnt be "All Pay", if you create content, you can get money too. It's like a payment counter that goes both ways rapidly.

Instead the HTML One-Way links, dead links, leeches, and no accountability system started. And it started ONLY because Xanadu was closed, secret system then (80's-early 90's), and HTTP/HTML was Public, known system.

Here's a system Project Xanadu developed to support microversioning (including an implementation for emacs):

http://www.xanadu.com.au/ted/OSMIC/

Share and enjoy,
*** Xanni ***

• Next Generation Internet
• Large Scale Networking
• The Xanadu model
• Common HTTP Implementation Problems
• Web Services Architecture Requirements
• etc, etc, etc

Bertrand Meyer for his contribution to OO Software Engineering, Eiffel language and Design By Contract.

I think an honourable mention most go to Ted Nelson and Xanadu.

While there is some controversy over this, it is *generally* accepted (at least in my circles) that Ted Nelson who founded the Xanadu project many, many moons ago.

I had the opportunity to speak with Ted on several occassions in Tokyo several years back and I must say that he is one of the most eccentric human beings I have ever met. In the first meeting he plopped a giant tape recorder on the table and then, in the midst of the discussion, pulled out a camcorder and started recording me while I spoke. The man records *everything* for some future purpose. Amazing, really.

On this subject, it's interesting to check out Xanadu , which is a system Ted Nelson proposed years ago (decades, really) that does hypertext and micropayments and all kinds of interesting things. Not that I think we should just ditch the web immediately and adopt Xanadu instead, but it's interesting anyway...

I've never seen such groundbreaking ideas like having portable access to information and record keeping. The last two times someone thought of a similar idea were 1945 and 1960. Way to go.

Xanadu has definitely got to be the king of vapourware! Four decades in the making, and still not ready :)
I guess it will never be, really. The original concept was way too wacky, even for modern times. But three cheers to Ted Nelson for his advances in Hypertext systems! Many of his concepts are used on the internet nowadays. Modern version-control systems remind me of his "time-scrolling" idea, and although we dont need "visible" links we certainly would be better off having zero broken links. He even foresaw copyright problems in the digital age!

...I've been using The Brain, which treats documents, programs, shortcuts, program groups, etc as "thoughts" which you can link to any other thought. Pretty cool.

After looking through the site, it reminds me a bit of Ted Nelson's ZigZag, only with a much prettier user interface.

ZigZag basically lets you set up arbitrary "axes" of meaning and drop nodes on them. Any node can contain anything, and be a member of any number of axes. All axes are orthogonal to all other axes. The user interface lets you move along any axis from any node. Thus, information is locally coherent but, if you step back, it's a rat's nest.

For example, for organizing things on your computer, you might create an axis named "Games," and link Quake, Starcraft, and Solitaire to it. Solitaire is published by Micros~1, so you might also set up a Micros~1 axis, which contains Solitaire, IE, Word, Excel, Outlook, etc. Solitaire would be a member of both "Games" and "Micros~1", but not of the "Network-aware" axis, which would contain Quake, Starcraft, IE, Outlook, etc.

ZigZag is very primitive right now, but the concept is very intriguing. Written in Perl and runs under Linux. Check it out.

Schwab

Charging a penny a page does nothing but give the user a right to view the page, which continues the lie of 'allowed usage' being propagated by the RIAA and other corporate bodies. Ted Nelson has been hawking his concept of Transpublishing alongside Xanadu for years. It describes a system where the user buys a right to use an item many times rather than a right to view it once. It also allows publishers to choose the amount they charge, and that charge can be nothing. Just as long as Microsoft or Verisign don't manage the payment servers it would be fine.

Greets!

The reason that 3D isn't popular or practical - paper. Our current metaphor for information derives from Xerox Parc, a PAPER company. A faithful emulation of an office desk is NOT the best way to represent the complex infoverse we live in.

And the current web is not the best way to represent it either. Go back to hypertextual research before the web - look at Guide, look at Microcosm, before the brain damage of HTML and Mosaic set in.

Even better, go and look at Xanadu and ZigZag - representing information and the relationships between individual pieces of it is a complex task, perhaps made harder by our current metaphors. See ANYTHING by Ted Nelson, such as his technical briefing at the latest Hypertext conference.Read Vannevar Bush's "As we may think"

I would argue that we don't need 3D browsers, but MULTIDIMENSIONAL infoviewers, that can let us define the relationships and properties that we are interested at any moment, AND LET US CHANGE THEM easily and intuitively - I still remember the only good part of Johnny Mnemonic - zooming around cyberspace - also, to a lesser degree Lawnmower Man.

This is the way forward, and we need to learn from the games industry - Look at Homeworld, Q3D, even Elite - these are the kind of intuitive navigational and representational metaphors we ned to adopt to allow people to create, browse, populate and interact with their information.

Let us be imaginative, and move forwards to a representation of information as something we can use, rather than something we write down.

Links:
Microcosm:(Home) http://www.iam.ecs.soton.ac.uk/
(Review)http://www.man.ac.uk/MVC/SIMA/mcosm/toc.ht ml
Guide: http://www.iath.virginia.edu/elab/hfl0142.html
HyperText Conference: http://www.ht01.org/
GZigZag - http://gzigzag.sf.net
Xanadu: http://www.udanax.com
http://www.xanadu.com
As We May Think: http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/flashbks/comput er/bushf.htm
The electronic labyrinth - a good intro to hypertext, slanted toward literature http://www.iath.virginia.edu/elab/elab.html

Computer Lib/Dream Machines is (are?) two of the most original books out there. One side of the book was titled 'Computer Lib'; you'd flip it over to find 'Dream Machines' printed from the other side. They met in the middle. Computer Lib was an idiosyncratic explanation of computer technology, complete with Nelson's own drawings. Dream Machines dived into Nelson's true love, how the computer screen could transform the way people used computers. (In 1974 the typical computer interface was a 10 characters-per-second teletype or a 30 cps DECwriter.) Nelson's ultimate goal was a hypertext (Nelson coined the word) system he called Xanadu. Nelson regards the web as a pale imitation of his plans for Xanadu. (Xanadu has never been finished, but it still lives: see xanadu.com) Ideally, you'd get a copy of the big, white, 1974 home-published version. Nelson put out a smaller revised version in 1987 from Microsoft Press. Both are of out of print. Computer Lib/Dream Machines remains a visionary book.

Note that Xanadu does not exist, being the king of vaporware. Nelson might have been the first to use the word hypertext, but it's too bad he never managed to finish anything...

If the web browser was patented, we'd have had to wait 17 years after 1960 for Ted Nelson's patent to expire. As that's only 1977, and the first commercial microcomputer had appeared only two years earlier, we'd not have had browsers in our homes immediately. And if we waited for Ted...well, we're still waiting for transpublishing and Project Xanadu to become popular. It took several more years for reasonable graphics to show up and make graphical web browsing practical. Commodore's Amiga and others had reasonable graphics, but it wasn't until VGA came out that graphics on most personal computers began to approach TV resolutions.

Some photos of Ten Nelson's Xanadu displaying hyperlinks in 1972 are here. Hopefully, Prodigy's lawyers will see this.

Also Ted Nelson's book Dream Machines/Computer Lib and hyperlinks to xanadu & udanax might be appropriate.

I wouldn't say it's a 'great' history, as it casts Nelson as an out and out eccentric with a drive to an Augean task which has been fraught with more disaster than Apple, which Nelson has refuted himself. Check out this link for a better view, or dig through the Xanadu project site or Ted Nelson's homepage.

and (in a different incarnation of sorts) was led by Roger Gregory:
http:www.udanax.org

and finally incorporated into AutoDESK in '88, at the urging of John Walker:
Statement for the Autodesk/Xanadu Press Conference

Unfortunately, AutoDESK (no longer under John's direct control) killed Xanadu in 92, of all times, not seeing any future in hypertext -- which is a shame, since IMHO Xanadu was and is much better than the mess which is the web.

Roger and Ted are certainly bemused by the BT thing... and would probably be more bemused if BT won :)

Okay I just checked out Xanadu and agree that I was wrong, it seems that they have Prior Art. I also looked at Xanadu's paper to the ACM and noticed that several references go back to 1965 or earlier. Could someone please email this link to info@scipher.com and explain to them why taking on BT's case was a lost cause.

A few random thoughts I had when I saw this article:

Three words: Serial Experiments Lain.

Four Words: Ghost In The Shell.

Both of the above have interesting ideas on the future of the internet. Especially Lain, where there is an entire episode that runs through a conspiracy theory that begins with Roswell and flows through Memex and Xanadu to Hypertext before diverging into Lain's somewhat bizarre storyline (does it make sense?)

Xanadu

Ted Nelson(?)'s idea of a global exchange of information that is accessible from anywhere is kind of like the current WWW on steroids. he first created it in the 1960's, and it has since been described by Tim Berners-Lee as the way he would have designed the web had he known about it in 1989.

Nanotechnology. This stuff is so cool that I can't even begin to imagine all the possibilities of it. (believe me, I've tried;)

There are so many things that could change the idea of networked data so radically that the internet in 10 years time may be some forgotten relic of an age gone by. At our current progress rate, by the year 2014, the human race will double its knowledge once a month, which is pretty incredible.

Okay, a pretty random post, but it's what I first thought of when I saw the question.

They've been working on this exact concept for text since 1960, it's called Xanadu.

www.xanadu.com

If you have a look at all it's features, you'll notice that it is pretty much what the WWW should have been. (Tim Berners-Lee has said as much).

Libraries are a hallowed U.S. tradition with a lot of strong backers and the entire balkanization of what is now printed matter will not come to pass without a very big fight. Possibly one day the Library of Congress could play a new roll in distribution (perhaps a media key allowing reading on a library slate, not a great solution but a minimum one).

In the end the author and publisher need a way to make a profit or there won't be any e-books. Stallman's closing remark that copyright will be obsolete is inane. Why should anyone be forced to submit to an idea of the masses that the product of their labor should be free or anything else? Some authors might accept variable or no payment depending on the reader's level of enjoyment but if it works out like shareware it hardly seems like empowering the author. Currently the phone company makes more than the author on shareware downloads.

Micropayment + Transcopyright, an open source culmination of decades of work in the field (Ted Nelson) is one possible strategy in a universe of them.. and Stallman is focusing on shouting when he could be lining up allies. There is no reason why an open source or other software solution not created by publishers could not take hold, if it addresses the needs of authors and publishers. Legal provisions allowing fair (personal or editorial) use need to be covered by new technologies, especially when "solutions" like zoning of DVDs make it impossible to read certain "texts". When infrastructure makes it possible to charge for consumption of media dynamically, that will open the doors of accessibility to many more authors who will depend on some kind of copyright law (perhaps the software code will exceed the legal code) to make their living.

Last I heard, libraries buy their books. So a limit on the number of times a book is read sounds unworkable. But if prices fall naturally (by economics, not some cracker's idea of fairness) to a dollar a book, there is no reason why payment cannot be made up front or from a dedicated account. So I think Stallman's fears are based on an assumption of frozen technology, and that more technology will allow authors to apply all kinds of payment schemes including different levels of payment, annotation, and other characteristics, as envisioned by Nelson and others. It would be more interesting to do a serious analysis of the work done in this field and work toward a solution than to put blinders on and be alarmist. There may be dangers but there are great possibilities.

On the danger side I see communications carriers and credit card companies enforcing stiff inescapable charges, and companies with vested interests in video and audio taking the initiative with things which look more like entertainment titles than books. On the positive side, how about asking the ALA (or O'Reilly, or the EFF,...) for some of that 2 billion and start experimenting openly (not necessarily GPL) with Transmeta slates? That way people will be able to hack at this problem for a long, long time. It may take that long for copyright owners to all shift to a Napster/Stallman/Shareware-esque style of compensation (or not) based on its own merits.

I am no fan of the DMCA. But if Stallman wants to overturn the DMCA he should quit talking about trying to make copyright obsolete and put some energy into figuring out what initiative he could start or join to build a reasonable business model which can be influenced by the community of believers in electronic freedom. If his thinking stands solely on the ideas of GPL and uncontrolled dissemination of works he will lose credibility among those of us who live in a market economy and with it the opportunity to lead.

In creating a decentralized information network, FreeNet is obviously drawing ideas from Ted Nelson's Project Xanadu. Of course, the www itself also drew from the same, pool of ideas. Unfortunately, it grew so fast that the implementation was not perfected before the standards such, as html, became de facto. Several issues, such as two-way linking, version management, and information maintenance were never addressed. Now we are left with several semi-fixes and upgrades (e.g. XML), which try to make a more perfect internet. I saw in the FAQ that unused information would automatically be deleted, which takes care of some information maintenance.

Now for my questions: How do you address these other ideas (two-way linking, version control, etc.) that Project Xanadu attempts? Do you, indeed, draw any of your ideas from Xanadu, or is the inspiration simply to make a better www? How, in general, does the FreeNet project compare to Project Xanadu?

I'm not saying this is the best solution in the MP3/Napster case, but it's an idea that has been around for a while.

Clearly, there's a lot of overhead in the music industry, and I think it's clear that consumers are interested in avoiding the costs associated with that overhead. Micropayments are one way for artists to get their music directly to listeners without the music industry middlemen.

As for compensating artists for listening to their MP3s, Ted Nelson's Xanadu project put forth a solution to that problem many, many years ago. Essentially, he advocated micropayments for "transcluded" material. In this example, a small payment (perhaps ten cents) would go to the artist each time you listened to his MP3. (Obviously the implementation of micropayments relies on computers and networks to be cost-effective.)

I'm not saying that's the right solution, just that it's one idea that has been out there for a while. Certainly the music industry has a lot of overhead built into the cost of a CD, and it sounds like there's a lot of interest on the consumer's end in reducing that overhead.

I'd like to second that recommendation. Marc based his book on a lot of the ideas that have swirled around this group (hypertext, idea futures, real computer security, smart contracting, etc.).

By the way, bidirectional linking is not new to the Web. It was new in 1997, when it was introduced by CritLink. I encourage you to check that out, too. It lets anybody annotate any public web page using any browser -- no software required.

-- ?!ng

In fact, the Xanadu Operating Company (XOC) was funded by AutoDesk (of AutoCad fame) for about five years under the pretext that the Xanadu system would make a dandy archive/retrieval system for AutoCad design files. That it also tickled the imagination of AutoDesk founder John Walker was a happy coincidence.

I was involved in a week's worth of discussion with the folks at XOC (and ESR) about turning USENET into a "coarse grain" hypertext system (after all, every article has a world-wide unique message-ID, required by the transport, and the software can use "references" like links), but there were a number of issues we didn't have clean answers for, and the discussion never resulted in software. Besides, now we have DejaNews as an archive of USENET, also Alta Vista can search it, too.

Anyway, when Carol Bartz became CEO of AutoDesk, she cut a lot of things (AutoDesk was in financial trouble at the time), and XOC was one of the casualties. Now, one could well ask why, with five years of funding, XOC never produced anything that the market saw...

I think the principal failing of Ted Nelson's dream was the almost relentless drive for perfection, with almost no "real world" testing of the incremental versions of the software - no one associated with the effort wanted to release anything less than complete and perfect.

Result: nothing was ever released (until now).

It'll be interesting to see if the code lives up to the decades of hype about it.