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Some of us what are old enough see so many "new" things that are repackaged "old" things that have been either forgotten about or simply over looked. Methinks this is another example. The implementation details may be different, but this idea was first promulgated in *1960*! http://www.xanadu.net/ refers...

Is that all? Excellent! In that case I think that I can cite an example of prior art.

I worked on a system called "MUCH", short for "Many Users Creating Hypermedia", at the University of Liverpool in England back in 1989-1992. Running on UNIX and built in-house by postgraduate students under the guidance of Professor Roy Rada using C and the Andrew Toolkit", the project itself was inspired by Ted Nelson's "Project Xanadu". Mention of the project is also made in Prof. Rada's C.V. at his current employer, The University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

Fairly obviously, given the name, MUCH allowed multiple users to collaboratively create SGML based hypermedia documents via an integrated version control mechanism similar to that employed by Wikipedia. These documents, while mostly textual (it was the early 1990's!) besides having the ability to contain both graphical and audio content, could also contain any number of embedded external applets written using the Andrew Toolkit. Some of the proof of concept applications developed while I was there (work continued after I left) included animated clocks, calendars, calculators and other widgets, many of which were interactive.

Looks a lot like the almost 50 year old project Xanadu :D
With cross platform event subscriptions ad libitum?

http://www.xanadu.net/
http://transliterature.org/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu

A 1d desktop is to have all your files and apps arranged linearly. You can do it by clearing you desktop and putting everything in your start menu. (no folders allowed. just scrolling)

A 4d or higher desktop could be as simple as a 2d desktop which allows you to rotate your view in more ways than 2... like ted nelson's zipperlists

Testify, Brother!!

The music never dies

Brought to you by the word "transclusion" and the letter "X"

Cheers,
*** Xanni ***

See xanadu. This idea has been around for a looong time.

Good to see more Xanadu ideas coming to fruition.

Okay, I'm biased-- I'm a developer of Gzz, a project that implements Ted Nelson's zzstructure: a data structure that different applications ("applitudes" in zzspeak) can use to store data on a computer. Since it doesn't separate information into files, it's perfectly possible for an email being connected to a proposal, for an address book to be shared between two apps, or for an email and a letter using the same address book entry to be connected (because if you use the address from the address book in those contexts, they implicitly become connected to the address and are only "one step away from it"-- which means they're only two steps away from each other).

Connected information is what computers can do that paper cannot. If I write two index cards that are related, then put them in two different boxes, there's no connection between them. The computer *can* be different: There's no technical reason it couldn't show the same card in different boxes, or another related card right next to it, even if it doesn't belong in the same box. But the computer isn't different, and the only way to make a connection is to make an HTML, one-way link-- the same as scribbling on a card, "This is related to card Foo in the orange box" (except that the computer automatically finds card Foo for us, UNLESS we've moved it into another box).

Trashing files may be radical, but IMHO it is also overdue.

Remember that once you've made a public statement in the real world, it's out there and there's nothing anyone can really do about it. You can issue(*) a later correction, retraction, clarification, or whatever, but the original doesn't go away, despite what politicians and other public figures might wish. Now that we all have access to the world's screens, we need to be careful what we say if we care about later consequences.

(*) There are other aspects of the Web that make this difficult. See the "Related Projects..." section at crit.org for more.

(apologies if I'm fuzzy on any details)

Ignore the fact that they catalyzed the web market (either as Netscape or as their preceding life as the Mosaic free university-ware browser) by making it easy to view pictures and text on the same page, as opposed to the previous ftp-like interfaces. And those Bad Bad Netscape Monopolists destroyed the chances for REAL HYPERTEXT which the Xanadu project was planning to ship Real Soon (after a mere 25 years of development :-).

Also, people *do* make superior browsers. The World Wide Web Consortium W3.org has done a variety of browsers that are cleaner, smaller, and more correct than the big MS and NetscapeZilla product suites. Opera has been lured away into bloatware by the evils of flashiness and feature creep, so they're no longer the lean, mean, fits-on-a-floppy browser that their wonderful early versions were, but they're still a lot smaller than their major competitors. And there are bunches of EMACS-based browser hacks, which were the original integrated browser/mailtool/newsreader/wordprocessor suite. (It's no longer "Eight Megabytes", but it's still "And Continually Swapping". :-)

Besides isn't it just using a few concepts from Xanadu?

"Picture 1980. Ted Nelson is running around with his Xanadu guys: Roger Gregory, H. Keith Henson (now waging war against the Scientologists) and K. Eric Drexler, later to build the Foresight Institute. They dream of creating what is to become the World Wide Web. Nowadays guys at hacker cons might dress like vampires. In 1980 they wear identical black baseball caps with silver wings and the slogan: 'Xanadu: wings of the mind.'"

1994-current. Work continues on the second XOC fine-grain hyper-sharin transpublishing server, under Roger Gregory and Keith Henson.

o In 1992, the Church of Scientology had become the first religious organization in Canada to be convicted of criminal conduct. Specifically, stealing documents from law firms, public associations and government entities -- and breach of trust. In addition, in the Casey Hill litigation, Scientology was ordered to pay millions of dollars to Canadian lawyer, Casey Hill, for slandering his reputation.

BTW, if you are looking for the current incarnation of Xanadu, look for zigzag.

jim

• Sections of the text can be extracted without missing an opening or closing tag. In HTML (and other embedded markup languages), excerpts require careful examination of enclosing tags to make sure the tags are closed and opened at the correct locations.
• Formatting is separated from content. If you don't want to see the formatting, you don't have to. This can also be useful for source code.. maybe you want each comment in your program to appear in italics. The source code itself can be extracted and run without the formatting.
• There are other pros, too. I believe the Project Xanadu lists them somewhere.

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.

Besides, Xanadu is certainly prior art, so why don't these people just go and get lost?

I hope this is a troll that I'm falling for.

The web is supposed to be linked together. That's why you put something on the web instead of publishing it in a 'zine or a book or any other form of printed materials. Just because you don't want or need one click access to relevent information doesn't mean that it shouldn't be there. Would you still visit slashdot if it didn't link to the articles it talked about? Would suck be any good without links?

I'm not arguing for linking to random information just because you can, but informative linking is why hypertext has the hyper.
--

Internet Overview

• Internet Timeline

Technical History

• Charles Spurgeon's Ethernet Web Site (several Ethernet historical documents here).
• I have a printed copy of an ALOHANET analysis, but can't seem to find one online.

Concept History

• As We May Think
• Project Xanadu ("Computer Lib/Dream Machines")
• The Cathedral and the Bazaar