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Xanadu: The Forgotten Hypertext
wikinerd writes "Xanadu, a project started in the 1960s to create a deep-linked hypertext infrastructure with xanalogical structures, is still alive, although largely forgotten due to the emergence of the Web."
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WAS alive. Thank you /..
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
Showering.
Do all Xanadu programmers look like Olivia Newton John?
"Nature bats last..."
Xanadu: The (righfully so) Forgotten Movie
Gene Kelly deserved better than to be in that crapfest.
"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
Oh, boy, Al Gore is going to be pissed off...
Looks like the Xanadu web page has been slashdotted.
shhhh...must..not..remember!!
eBayDig 1s a typo saerch engien
Slashdotted already? Wow. The mirrordot pages don't exist either. Are those the right links?
I store my recipes online (the way nature intended)
"Xanadu, a project started in the 1960s to create a deep-linked hypertext infrastructure with xanalogical structures, is still alive, although largely forgotten due to the emergence of the Web."
And now you finally killed it by slashdotting it, you webmonger bastard!
Actually, it was largely forgotten due to the performance of the Olivia Newton John.
http://web.archive.org/
just don't slashdot that too!
Hi.
I'm still alive, too.
Yeah, that's kinda a mundane fact, but the evidence says that Slashdot cares about that sort of thing.
Would someone be so kind as to submit this comment as a Slashdot front-page story? I'd feel kinda egotistical submitting it myself.
Trolling is a art,
With a name like that, no wonder it was forgotten. Xanudu, Xunudu, Xunado, ahh screw it.
----
Go canucks, habs, and sens!
wired did an article several years ago on xanadu. no other progress occurred. I'm guessing that the web is good enough that the few concepts that xanadu had over the web today only really interested a handful of people. the web is the 90 percent solution to the problem, and if the other 10 percent really want to *fix* it , then they need to take care of it themselves. You know what they say about the last 10 percent of the project...
I do wish I had editors that kept historical trees instead of a single undo chain, though.
They are right...I had forgoteen about it long ago...I haven't even touched my NES system in a LONG time! :)
http://www.cs.brown.edu/memex/ACM_HypertextTestbed /papers/60.html
: xanadu.com/+xanadu&hl=en
http://64.233.167.104/search?q=cache:gdhB0XBfAdsJ
For the last time, Al Gore single-handedly created the Internet, not just Web, which is only a part of it - get your facts straight.
Mention it pre-1970s, and everyone thinks of Coleridge and the pleasure dome of Kublai Khan.
Mention it post-1970s, and everyone thinks of Olivia Newton-John in her roller disco boots.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
I know it's been a couple of minutes. I'd just like to point I'm still alive.
Hope I didn't keep any of you in suspense or anything. As pointed out by noted scientist Douglas Adams, suspense can be fatal in large doses.
Parent's signature (We sleep...) is sad but so accurate.
Slashdot entertains. Windows pays the mortgage.
A little bit about Xanadu now that we've killed it off for good...
Happiness is like peeing yourself. Everybody can see it but only you can feel its warmth.
His server was fine, y'know,
'Til we linked to Xanadu.
And now, click on the link and see,
The website's now 503,
Slashdotted Xanadu.
A million lights are dancing and there you are, a shooting star
No Google cache I see, so you're 503, eternally
Chorus:
Xanadu! XanaduuuuoooooooOOooOO!, (now we are here) in Xanadu!
Xanadu! XanaduuuuoooooooOOooOO!, (pass me a beer) in Xanadu!
(Colo boxen blinkenlights will shine... for you, Xanadu!)
(Repeat chorus until 404 or 503...)
While they're putting out the fire in whatever server they were running, you can read this,a 27-page Wired article from 1995.
Also check this, that, and the other.
compare timestamps
2:29 PM
2:35 PM
You've been warned. Mods, do your worst.
So does this infringe on British Telecom's hypertext patent from the eighties? :)
Anyone know if Samuel Colt was shot to death or not?
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Wired had an excellent long article about the Xanadu project in 1995---great storytelling. Seen here: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/3.06/xanadu_pr. html.
MAN SHOOTS ROVER!
There is a lot going on with Xanadu, and the project has great potential. There is a hard working team that is working on making some of Ted Nelson's dreams come true. Check out http://www.hypertexture.com for some fascinating videos that show just how some of this stuff works. There is also a discussion forum for you to provide you're own 2 cents, and get in touch directly with some of the developers.
Forget Xanadu. Gopher is the true overlord of Internet protocols.
Here's a thought...
Xanadu might be more than a curiosity, if something can be shown to have been used in Xanadu for a long time, it just might provide a case for prior art, in order to quash a few stupid HTML and GUI method patents.
My rights don't need management.
citizen kane?
Xanadu is dead. In fact, Xanadu was never alive. It could have been. But...
They were so sure that it was going to be hot stuff that they kept the data structures secret that were needed to implement it. So... nobody implemented it.
Then came the web, and it was good enough. The need has been filled, and nobody cares about Xanadu. Even if there was a free, publicly available implementation, nobody would care.
Ego and greed killed Xanadu - or rather, kept it from ever being born.
There was also a chain of tourist-trap bubblehouses called "Xanadu".
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
The bastards!
So who went and appointed you Netcraft?
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
The software proect may have been too ambitious to be practical (on hardward of the time) but just try to touch his 1974 book for less than $100 (not the Msft reprint).
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
Is this enough to invalidate all of the hypertext/html-like markup language patents?
If you recognize what I just said, you're too old to be in this business. Other signs are: responding to most of your younger colleage's ideas with variations of "we tried that once, it didn't work," or rambling on about what it was like to program with 2K of working memory.
As for the rest of you, if you want to know why "old timer" is usually preceded by "bitter"...
You kids down't know how bad you have it these days. Back in the halcyon days when Xanadu showed its promise, there were no credentials. You didn't need no certifications, or even a degree. There was no functional monopoly anymore, IBM was the evil empire, but its power was eviscerated by fighting the DOJ for a decade. DEC produced nice machines and software. Jobs were plentiful and you could take your pick of platform.
The future was bright; Microsoft was just a twinkle in Bill's eye. The only people who worked in computers were smart. There were no such things as frameworks, only libraries whose lack of documentation was made up for by their small size. Compiling a program longer than a thousand lines meant you had time for a walk in the park, or to socialize with your colleagues, or play a text, or read Usenet posts.
Jobs were plentiful and there was no offshoring, so pay was high. The birth control pill had been invented, and there wasn't anything you could catch that couldn't be cured by a course of penicillin, so women were easy.
Nobody had heard of spyware or adware or even worms or viruses -- the nastiness thing anybody had was a "chain job". Software was going to transform the world, entirely for the good. Practically every idea, like Xanadu, was big and transformative.Hacking was a constructive activity and an outlet for creativity. There was nobody to stop you, because nobody had any idea of how to measure programmer productivity.
Well I guess some things don't change.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Parent's signature (We sleep...) is sad but so accurate.
So remember to thank your neighborhood cops, active military, and reservists next time you see one of them. I know that doesn't go over well with the anarchist / teenage angst crowd here.... But purely from a selfish standpoint, it's a good idea. Let them know you appreciate it, and they'll have another good reason to keep protecting you.
I got my Linux laptop at System76.
you my friend are a overdressed anarchist...
i am not overdressed!
this is a refrence to a even older xanadu movie then olivia newton john.. thank you..
1960? That's a great source for prior art if another greedy scumbag comes along and tries to patent anything with hyperlinks.
Oh where, oh where is my Xanadu?
You had to link to it, didn't you?.
It's gone to heaven, so I've got to be good,
So I can see the 'du when I leave this world.
I'd started to load it in my roommate's Dell,
the hard drive was taking it pretty well.
During the load, someone sent a ping,
Because of the link, Xanadu was dead.
I couldn't stop, so I yanked the cord.
I'll never forget, the sound , oh Lord--
the screamin' drives, the speaker's blast,
the painful scream that I-- heard last.
Oh where, oh where is my Xanadu?
You hadda slashdot it, didn't you?
It's gone to heaven, so I've got to be good,
So I can see the 'du when I leave this world.
When I woke up, the sparks were pourin down.
There were admins standin all around.
Some fragments of chips gotten in my eyes,
but somehow I found my Xanadu that night.
I lifted the CD, Olivia winked and said,
"They gave me a fatal Heart Attack, ack ack Heart Attack"
I held it close, I kissed the label--our last kiss.
I found the love that i knew i had missed
well now it's gone, even I loaded it right
I lost my Xanadu and the Dell-- that night.
...we slashdot the site and kill it for good.
Slashdot: stuff for news, nerds that matter, matter for news, stuff that nerd
Ted Nelson is a bitter old man who can't stand anything that isn't his perfect hypertext system that he never let anyone else implement. He buried ZigZag and Xanadu in patents and trade secrets and threatened anybody who dared make their own implementation.
The web was based on a simple SGML DTD that anyone could understand, and everyone was encouraged to implement it. No wonder Ted lost. Looks like he still can't stop griping about it.
That server is also dead.
The last time I checked the source there, there was no evidence of code maintenance, so I don't know if anyone is working on it. There's no Freshmeat record for either Xanadu or Udanax, suggesting that nobody has forked the code.
Freshmeat does refer to a data organization package by Nielson, called ZigZag, which allowed multi-dimensional data organization, but I don't know enough about it to say if it'll do anything that other data schemes (HDF5, netCDF, XML,
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
They had computers back in the 60s? Wasn't that like one hundred years ago?
As many might have known, the Xanadu culture has a lot of neologisms -- more than most software projects. They tried to use these neologisms in a consistent manner but you can imagine how difficult it would have been to really get things right with all those new words. Roger said someone, Mark Miller I believe, ran a sourcecode conversion on the Xanadu sourcecode base which did a right-shift (or was it left shift?) of one for all the the Xanadu glossary terms.
This was supposed to be a "joke" since of course all of the major programmers of the Xanadu project were memory demigods (except of course Ted Nelson who admits he needs to videotape everything because of his faulty memory) but the effect was a bit more than a mere joke, resembling to some significant degree the effect the Elohim had on the builders of the Tower of Babel when they made them speak different languages.
Seastead this.
I think that everybody is in agreement that the Xanadu ideas are great, it's just that nothing has yet all that usefull has materialised. I can't think of a single person that I've shown it to that hasn't said the same thing: great concepts, but where is the implementation? Fortunately there is a team of people in Nottingham (UK) that are working hard on getting something done that actually works. I've met the team, and I've seen the prototypes. All I can say is wow. Check out this websight for some videos that show just how some of these ideas are being brought to life, and leave some comments for the developers on the forum: http://www.hypertexture.com
Life's EULA: shit happens.
Hold it...is that like McLogical(tm) or eLogical?
More "worse is better" thinking brought us, first gopher and next the WWW.
Someday, we'll be semantic, and the same as Xanadu - a project named for Colridge's opium hallucination.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
The World Wide Web was not what we were working toward, it was what we were trying to *prevent*. The Web displaced our principled model with something far more raw, chaotic and short-sighted. Its one-way breaking links glorified and fetishized as "websites" those very hierarchical directories from which we sought to free users, and discarded the ideas of stable publishing, annotation, two-way connection and trackable change.
Well Ted, that's why you lost. See, the rest of the world didn't want you dictating your "principled model" on them, they wanted something very much like the web. There's a reason we don't use WAIS anymore.
Come on, the only thing you released was Zig Zag, which was perhaps the worst interface metaphor in existence -- and even in terms of information organization, it couldn't compete with dBase. But you'd rather proclaim that the world is made of ignoramuses who just can't comprehend your perfect vision rather than admit that you might had had one or two ideas that the rest of the world just didn't think were so hot.
When someone tries to patent "hyperlinks", we can show them prior art! :P
You can easily replace Ted's central data storage with something distributed such as a P2P network à la Kademlia.
They key point of his work is that all data is in the same globally adressable "carpet" that nobody can modify. Nothing is deleted, only added. When you want to "modify" something, you write a new copy and link to that new data instead. And you get the tree you talked about.
As long as someone on the network is interested in the data (ie. is caching it) it will remain available to everyone else.
This kind of program would be awesome for open source software. Imagine a fully distributed Sourceforge.
http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/g/gopher.html/ 19/rice .confirmation/top.rice.0119.ap.jpg
Is that still around?
How big was it?
or
I am crushing your head.
http://i.a.cnn.net/cnn/2005/ALLPOLITICS/01
Peace.
Clicked it anyways. It appears to be a paper on Xanadu. It has lots of broken images, but otherwise, no goatse.
Perhaps a virus scan of your machine is in order.
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
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
Did anyone else waste 30 seconds of his life trying to figure out what a logical exclusive and would work like? Please let me not be the only one.
To the moderator who modded that "Overrated": Yeah, no shit.
Congratulations on almost, but not quite, getting it.
By the way, it's been a bit but I would like to confirm I am indeed still alive, and that that is still Slashdot-worthy news. Thanks for caring.
Kane's estate in Citizen Kane. Kane was (looosely) based on the life of the publishing magnate William Randolph Hearst. Xanadu was based on Hearst's San Simeon estate.
[Insert pithy quote here]
... the deepest mystery; from an ancient .man I took a clue.
(No, no more. I repent.)
We actually talked on the phone at one point. Nelson's smart, but somehow never quite caught that the power of the internet was in its openness. As Tim Berners-Lee always says - if he'd tried to make money off the world wide web, it would never have happened.
Energy: time to change the picture.
Yes, the Xanadu web page appears to be slashdotted!
I was busy writing an email to Microsoft to inform them that their OS might have a few security issues, and could not get here in time to point that out myself. Thanks for covering for me!
- Captain Obvious
I wonder, if by some miracle Xanadu had actually become a real and mainstream, how well Xanadu would have held up to the Slashdot Effect?
--
"Open source is good." - Steve Jobs
"Open source is evil." - Microsoft
For the last time, Al Gore was the primary proponent of government-sponsored internet research, "creating the internet" from the government-controlled ARPANET.
Gore never said he invented the internet. Get your facts straight. Or is it you want to peddle lies?
Xanadu is cool and all... but this is quite questionable "news." The article linked seems to be from 2000. The site in question has been around since 1960. There doesn't seem to be much in the way of news here, except for wikinerd going "oh! xanadu is still alive!" Is that the story? wikinerd discovers xanadu, you should too!?
The following sentence is true. The preceding sentence was false.
There was gzigzag.sourceforge.net for a while. It was a java implementation of zigzag. But, Ted got a patent on the zigzag structure, so that project died in favor of another one.
I think that it was in the late 1980s - not sure.
At that time, I was getting into hypertext tools and Xanadu looked good, but if I remember correctly, no code. A very bright sysadmin at PacBell (Karl Wabe) showed me the original WWW stuff at CERN - basically a lot of physics papers linked together. The browser was text based (lynx like). Very cool.
The great thing about the WWW early on was that software was available - it was shortly seeing the CERN system that our sysadmin at SAIC installed the CERN web server, and those of us who wanted it went crazy with our personal pages. When a graphical web browser was released from the Univ. of IL, then things really went crazy.
Anyway, my point is that (as far as I remember) I could get Xanadu design documents but no software (apologies if my recollection is wrong - it was a long time ago!) Who knows what would have happened if in the 1980s the Xanadu project released free reference software. Xanadu is very different that the WWW (more like a wiki) but perhaps people would be using both systems today.
its teh inTARWEB!!!!!111
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
and Ovonics, and the Hiller flying platform, and Tesla's wireless power tranmission, and the GeOS operating system, and a thousand and one other brilliantly innovative things that coulda been a contender... things that still make the people that knew them cast longing looks into a wonderful past.
What made these things so wonderful was that they were 10% real and 90% handwaving. None of them were outright fakery and none of their inventors were outright charlatans, but for all the glitter of gold dust it was never clear that any of them were backed by a real vein that could actually be mined.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Ok, so I read it.
Whats to stop people re-publishing any content and then linking to it? The copyright parody the paper mocks is still there.
I'm probably missing something.
For the last time...NO ONE GIVES A FLYING FUCK what Al Gore was the primary proponent of!
I've seen a couple of Ted Nelson's demonstrations of ZigZag (I work at the University where he's currently a visiting fellow) it seems as though a lot of Xanadu (intellectually) lives on in ZigZag. It's a great system, although I worry that it might suffer the same fate as Xanadu. ZigZag is a pretty big concept, a completely new way of storing and organising data. Uses for ZigZig might include an OS/filesystem for mobile phones or PDAs.
NO ONE GIVES A FLYING FUCK what the facts are about Al Gore and the internet!
In Xanadu did Kublai Khan
a stately pleasure-dome decree,
where Alph, the sacred river, ran
through caverns measureless to man
down to a sunless sea,
There are two problems with it. The first is that no one except Ted thinks that way. That's just not how we tend to organise things to ourselves in the everyday. The second is that you can get 95% of the above functionality with a simple SQL database, which most people do understand.
This is just a re-run of Xanadu. I've always seen Xanadu as a brilliant thing to have around if you already had one. But there's no bootstrap step to get there, and few people think and work that way anyway. The Web, for all its faults, is actually the right solution for a constantly changing, hetrogeneous information environment.
Ted needs to realise that "solves 95% of the problem in a straight-forward way" is better than "solves the last 5% in the most brilliant fashion possible".
The powerful idea here is that works of creatively in a Net-centric world tend to be derivative. E.g, complications + some new original contributions, which could range from new prose to editorial comments or just some indexing scheme. As we can see in the music industry, the idea of creating new works from whole cloth is largely dead. We need something like thimble space to handle the IP ownership, control, credit or just know who to give reputation points to.
I remember hearing Ted Nelson talk at the same conf. I was; people asking questions; he gave good responses. Plus he tossed the barb, "I've been thinking about this for 20 years, of course I have the answer to that..."
When Autodesk was funding, I thought it would happen with folk like Mark Miller doing data structures...
Anyway, the powerful idea is is in how do track, monetize and create derivative works of text. Should work for music too..
http://www.hawknest.com/
An earlier movie reference is Citizen Kane.
Xanadu was the name of Kane's mansion.
I agree, facts have nothing to do with the truth. I watch fox for my truth.
Gore never claimed to invent the internet. He really got a raw deal. But he didn't want people to keep their facts straight. He wanted what he did to sound better than it was. He deserved to get burned, just not nearly as badly as he did. He did fib a lot during his campaign, which while not really malicious was kind of stupid considering that people were paying attention to what he said.
English is easier said than done.
Kubla Khan
by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round:
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.
But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted
Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!
A savage place! as holy and enchanted
As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon-lover!
And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,
As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,
A mighty fountain momently was forced:
Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst
Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,
Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher's flail:
And 'mid these dancing rocks at once and ever
It flung up momently the sacred river.
Five miles meandering with a mazy motion
Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,
Then reached the caverns measureless to man,
And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean:
And 'mid this tumult Kubla heard from far
Ancestral voices prophesying war!
The shadow of the dome of pleasure
Floated midway on the waves;
Where was heard the mingled measure
From the fountain and the caves.
It was a miracle of rare device,
A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!
A damsel with a dulcimer
In a vision once I saw:
It was an Abyssinian maid,
And on her dulcimer she played,
Singing of Mount Abora.
Could I revive within me
Her symphony and song,
To such a deep delight 'twould win me,
That with music loud and long,
I would build that dome in air,
That sunny dome ! those caves of ice!
And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.
The parent comment has succeded it (it being making every moderator look stupid).
To summarize, it's OFFTOPIC.
The World-Wide Web: Origins and Beyond
http://www.zeltser.com/web-history/
The paper also briefly discusses the influences on the development of Xanadu itself.
"There are two problems with it. The first is that no one except Ted thinks that way. That's just not how we tend to organise things to ourselves in the everyday. The second is that you can get 95% of the above functionality with a simple SQL database, which most people do understand."
You may be correct in thinking that few apart from Ted think visually in that way. BUT, inventions are not always used in the way they were originally intended - For example radio was invented as a medium for two-way communication and phonographs as a means of replacing letters.
Equally consider zigzag not as a visualisable structure per say, but rather as a queryable data source, and therein lies its organisational power, where the potential for previously unavailable functionality emerges.
Of course we can strive to make it better. I still want to help make our collaborative conversations better, but by building on the potential that the Web has proven and not by reverting to Ted's nor anybody else's earlier ideas, not even my own.
-- Our systemic servants do not good masters make.
I remember watching a BBC documentary about HyperText and the Xanadu system years ago. It was written by Douglas Adams, and featured himself and ex-"Doctor Who" Tom Baker. It discussed the Xanadu system and I remember "Kubla Khan" featuring heavily, using a hypertext system to annotate the poem. The only other things that stick in my memory about the programme are Tom Baker's distinctive (and slightly spooky) voice, and a big stack of televisions in a junkyard... not sure what they were!
/
This was all several years before I ever got my hands on the WWW...
A quick Google search revealed this (includes two Douglas Adams references):
http://www.faqs.org/faqs/xanadu-faq
Of course Xanadu will live on forever as the base protocol of the collective human subconsious in "Serial Experiments: Lain" anime series....
/. is backwards today... I post a funny and I get +3 Insightful. Oh well... karma is karma, no matter the flavor :)
Several years ago I attended a lecture, given by Ted Nelson in Edinburgh (Napier) University. The lecture was fascinating on all fronts and certainly one of the most entertaining lectures I've ever attended. Nelson is a fascinating character with his fair share of axe's to grind, his rants about the world wide web, Tim Berners Lee and the W3C, pulled no punches. His arguments were that the world wide web was at best a poorly implemented parody of his grand vision; Xanadu, Transmedia, Transclusion and micropayments. His belief that the W3C is a juggernaut steaming ahead trying to standardise a poorly conceived mess; with bolt on hierarchical hamburgers such as XML. His thoughts on Tim Berners Lee seemed to be along the lines of "If you're going to steal my idea then you could have at least implemented more of it and done it better!"
t /textz/rheingold_howard_tools_for_.tmp
Ted is a self proclaimed visionary, who has since adopted the role of a heretic; fighting on against impossible odds (the Web\W3C...). His ideas are\were undoubtedly original, innovative and perhaps slightly crazy. Whether he is a genius or just plain mad is anyones guess!
ZigZag for example made a fascinating demo, of ways in which you could view a family tree. It was incredibly confusing as the tree was rearranged on the fly across numerous axis.
The sceptic in me thinks Nelson is a merchant of vapourware. His claims into having discovered mathematical methods for indexing and uniquely referencing passages of text (regardless of their size) on a global network are a little hard to believe. Particularly as he refuses point blank to demonstrate any of this "technology".
Perhaps the most interesting thing about the lecture was Ted himself. He was clearly excentric and possibly even bordering on (a mild) mental illness. His clothes (and I mean ALL of them) were covered in pockets, some of which had clearly been stitched on by himself. These pockets were literally overflowing with a million and one items, including pens, pencils, rulers, batteries, cellotape, calculators, pda's, a dictophone; you name it, it was there.
He appeared to be incredibly forgetful, even forgeting that he was holding what he was looking for! During the lecture he would record himself (on his dictophone), then later after rambling off topic he would appear to have forgotten completely what he was talking about. Once he realised, he would pause; rewind the tape and play it back so he could find his place.
His attention span also appeared to be incredibly short. Perhaps this is why Xanadu and dis-organised information systems such as hypertext (a term he coined) appeal to him so much. The similarity between how lost he gets in conversation threads, and how easily you can get lost in hypertext is (to me at least) slightly startling.
You can read more about Ted in Howard Rheingolds Tools for Thought http://datadump.galeropia.org/textz.gnutenberg.ne
Nelson makes me think of Bill Gates.
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
... and you call yourself 'nerds'.
Ah! I see. You met with Cagliostro, I presume. So, tell me, how is that old chap holding up these days? Last time I spoke with him, he was quite furious with the 9 kings; it had something to do with how they had messed up the Yesodic current. Well, if you meet him again, tell him Alastor will be attending the annual meeting at the mountain.
Author: Don Hopkins
Posted: 8/27/1999; 9:50:10 PM
Topic: Xanadu--some initial reactions
I sent this to Dave and he insisted I post it, but I'm not sure it will fit, so I'm posting it in parts... I suppose Xanadu would solve all these problems, but hey we're stuck with the World Wide Web today, so you're all going to have to SUFFER!!! Condolences in advance.
-Don
From: Hopkins, Don <DHopkins@maxis.com>
To: <dave@scripting.com>
Sent: Wednesday, August 25, 1999 7:59 PM
Subject: RE: Ted Nelson Returns
Sheez. You don't actually believe anybody will be able to do anything useful with all that source code, do you? Take a look at the code. It's mostly uncommented glue gluing glue to glue. Nothing reusable there.
Have you gotten it running? The documentation included was not very helpful. Is there a web page that tells me how to run Xanadu? Did you have to install Python, and run it in a tty window?
What would be much more useful, would be some well written design documents and port-mortems, comparisons with current technologies like DHTML, XML, XLink, XPath, HyTime, XSL, etc, and proposals for extending current technologies and using them to capture the good ideas of Xanadu.
Has Xanadu been used to document its own source code? How does it compare to, say, the browseable cross-referenced mozilla source code? Or Knuth's classic Literate Programming work with TeX?
Most of the stuff that's going on with XML is much more down-to-earth, up-to-date and interesting.
A simple, reusable library like Jim Clark's Expat XML parser gets me a lot closer to my goal, than all that hot air about grandiose theories that have never been tested in the real world.
-Don
From: Dave Winer <dave@userland.com>
Sent: Wednesday, August 25, 1999 8:06 PM
To: Hopkins, Don
Subject: Re: Ted Nelson Returns
I agree with you, but let them have a little bit of sunshine. Ted Nelson was a big influence on me, and for that I am grateful. Dave
From: Hopkins, Don <DHopkins@maxis.com>
To: 'Dave Winer' <dave@userland.com>
Sent: Wednesday, August 25, 1999 8:58 PM
Subject: RE: Ted Nelson Returns
I suppose they deserve all the attention they can get. It's just disheartening how the open source cheerleaders are ooohing and aaahing about it without seeing it for what it is. It makes me worry about them...
Last time I saw Ted Nelson talk (a few years ago at Ted Selker's NPUC workshop at IBM Almaden), he was quite bitter, but he didn't have anything positive to contribute. He talked about how he invented everything before anyone else, but everyone thought he was crazy, and how the world wide web totally sucks, but it's not his fault, if only they would have listened to him. And he verbally attacked a nice guy from Netscape (Martin Haeberli -- Paul's brother) for lame reasons, when there were plenty of other perfectly valid things to rag the poor guy about.
Don't get me wrong -- I've got my own old worn-out copy of the double sided Dream Machines / Computer Lib, as well as Literary Machines, which I enjoyed and found very inspiring. I first met the Xanadu guys some time ago in the 80's, when they were showing off Xanadu at the MIT AI lab.
I was a "random turist" high school kid visiting the AI lab on a pilgrimage. That was when I first met Hugh Daniel: this energetic excited big hairy hippie guy in a Xanadu baseball cap with wings, who I worked with later, hacking NeWS. Hugh and I worked together for two different companies porting NeWS to the Mac.
I "got" the hypertext demo they were showing (presumably the same code they've finally released -- that they were running on an Ann Arbor Ambassador, of course). I thought Xanadu was neat and important, but an obvious idea that had been around in
Take a look and feel free: http://www.PieMenu.com
"I think that everybody is in agreement that the Xanadu ideas are great, it's just that nothing has yet all that usefull has materialised."
The CIA was ahead.
Concordia was ahead.*
*The OS is still available.
Actually... many times people know this and are joking - but I'll bite.
Vinton Cerf and Robert Kahn both authored a letter which actually support Gore's progressive attitude when it came to Internet funding during it's early days.
Get your Unix fortune now!
a million replies about olivia newton john, and not even one single blurb about Rush. And you people call yourselves geeks?
No, but I did waste ~30 seconds typing a reply to your post.
Required reading for internet skeptics
Something so hellbent on copyright and control is obviously inherently evil.
To seek the sacred river Alpha To walk the caves of mice To break my fast on Honeywell And drink the milk of P-r-0-N... I had heard the whispered tales of immorality The deepest mystery From an ancient Ebook I took a clue I scaled the frozen mountain tops of eastern lands unknown Time and Man alone Searching for the lost Xanadu Xanadu... To stand within the Transclusion Decreed by Ted Nelson To taste anew the fruits of life The last immoral man To find the sacred river Alpha To walk the caves of mice Oh, I will dine on Honeywell And drink the milk of P-r-0-N A thousand years have come and gone but time has passed me by Stars stopped in the sky Frozen in an everlasting view Waiting for the world to end, weary of the night Praying for the light Prison of the lost Xanadu Xanadu... Held within the Transclusion Decreed by Ted Nelson To taste my bitter triumph As a mad immoral man Nevermore shall I return Escape these caves of mice For I have dined on Honeywell And drunk the milk of P-r-0-N
'He who has to break a thing to find out what it is, has left the path of wisdom.' -- Gandalf to Saruman
If you get within screaming distance of Marin County Ted will tell how he invented the first web protype- loudly and often.
There were several hypertext projects in the 1980s. I liked Apple's HyperCard. However, it was Berners- Lee's that caught on. His was relatively simple, had most of the basic parts, and most importantly, was freely downloadable from the Net. This pretty much paralleled UNIX/Linux's experience. I recall Ted charged licenses for his, it didnt have all the necessary pieces, and didnt really understand the exploding InterNet.
They stand ready to do violence on our behalf... But then they get bored standing and start doing pre-emptive violence, you know jusr a little bit, who would know? And then they get the taste of power that violence brings and before you can blink the rough men are pulling you out of your bed to do the violence to you on behalf of the "state" or are bombing others in their beds in foreign lands "on your behalf". And when they get over their heads and the violence gets out of control they will come to pull whomever is still in their beds and will speak the word "Draft" to them.
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round:
And here were gardens bright with sinuous rills
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.
But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted
Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!
A savage place! as holy and enchanted
As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon-lover!
And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,
As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,
A mighty fountain momently was forced;
Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst
Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,
Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher's flail:
And 'mid these dancing rocks at once and ever
It flung up momently the sacred river.
Five miles meandering with a mazy motion
Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,
Then reached the caverns measureless to man,
And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean:
And 'mid this tumult Kubla heard from far
Ancestral voices prophesying war!
The shadow of the dome of pleasure
Floated midway on the waves:
Where was heard the mingled measure
From the fountain and the caves.
It was a miracle of rare device,
A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!
A damsel with a dulcimer
In a vision once I saw:
It was an Abyssinian maid,
And on her dulcimer she played,
Singing of Mount Abora.
Could I revive within me
Her symphony and song,
To such a deep delight 't would win me
That with music loud and long,
I would build that dome in air,
That sunny dome! those caves of ice!
And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.
Honey, I shrunk the Cygwin
Sure, Xanadu is the oldest and best hypertext, if you like intertwingled enfilades, but it's one thing to talk about Xanadu creating prior art for the technology and another quite thing to accuse the Xanadudes of having anything resembling *business methods* :-) How much is a Golden Vaporware award worth, anyway?
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
But the original intent w/ the Web was wiki-like as well---worldwideweb.app on a NeXT Cube allowed one to browse _and_ edit---it was only when Mosaic was released that one had a graphical Web Browser which was crippled to only browse.
Tim Berners-Lee discusses this in his nifty book _Weaving the Web_ (which also has a cameo by Ted Nelson) as well as a brief bit where he notes he was writing early drafts of the book in NaviPress (a browser which was also an editor) which later became AOLpress.
William
(who was really glad when Nvu came along and offered a decent visual editor which can publish to AOL servers since AOL took away the http-put feature which AOLpress used)
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
This has been mentioned on slashdot at least a couple times in the past. Why keep bringing it up every couple years when NOTHING has changed?
-a.e.mossberg
This could be meaningful if they made it free software.
Bypass Compulsory Web Registration -- http://bugmenot.com/
The Xanadu design was decentralized among a network of mutual cache/mirror servers, something like Akamai or a server-level bittorrent. There was nothing impractical in the design of it (except getting the software finished!).
The server network was going to be owned by a single company. When you published, you signed an agreement with that company to let anyone quote you with the provision that you received automatic credit (backward link) & royalties.
The company itself didn't have censorship or filtering functions, it was more of a common carrier than most ISPs are now.
I don't see why the single server owner necessarily would lead to a civil liberties disaster. At least, not more than AOL, Verizon and eBay are civil liberties disasters.
In Xanadu (the software project) lore, bad things that happened, bad omens, or bad ratings on other's writings, were "porlocks," while the positive marks were "rosebuds," I think. So instead of a -3 or +3 you could receive 3 porlocks or three rosebuds.
If we were operating on a xanadu system he'd be making money off this slashdotting... but instead it's costing him.
A nice little kick in the teeth for dear old project xanadu from the free software anti-copyright communists eh?
McClary was quiet, hippieish and, by the time he hooked up with Xanadu, an expert in writing long, complex programs in C. His method was to take a few days to absorb the design, plot out his approach carefully, and then implement his plan in a long stretch of sustained concentration. According to his colleagues, McClary took about three times as long as most programmers to come up with a first version - but his first try usually worked.
Designing ahead, of course, pays off with intrest by reducing coding time and committing genocide on debugging time and error rates. But my colleagues never quite grasped what I was doing during the coding phase.
What I'd do was simultaneously build the code, a test suite, and a set of expected test outputs. (When I had make available: a passing test would be the default target, causing the make to fail if the code had a detected bug.) Then I'd code like a top-down tree walk, debugging as I went. Finally, I'd keep hardcopy listings and mark them to track what lines, or portions of lines, had been exercised by the test suite and passed. ("Pass" meant: "It does what was intended and the test is capable of detecting that isn't failing.")
The result is like growing a perfect crystal. A code/test/debug iteration would take single-digit minutes, even on the glacial processors of the time. Any flaws are confined to the growing edge (or still-untested code that is finally being exercised by the new code), making finding and fixing them almost instant. Expressing the design in two diverse ways - as commented code and a test suite - tends to eliminate blind spots by applying two modes of thought. Building and running a test suite as part of the compile process exposes unexpected code behavior, and also exposes spec or architectural problems as soon as the related code is begun. Leaving the test suite in place and rerunning it on every compile guards against accidental breakage of something already debugged. Tracking that the test suite checks the code gives confidence that the code is done and you can move on to another section. Once you move on from a piece of code, you typically NEVER have to revisit it - unless the spec changes or you later discover a flaw in your understanding of it. (But you usually discover such flaws, and any omissions, as you code the specified part.)
This method is BLAZINGLY fast. But it leads to administrative misunderstandings - such as an apples-to-oranges comparison: I would report success when my code was done: Written, tested, debugged, test suite in place, I'm moving on to the next project. Others would report progress every time they got a clean compile-and-link with a bit of functionality added or modified. (If I'd done that I'd be reporting "progress" several times an hour, rather than every day or two.) So my project completion was compared to other programmers' single iterations, leading to the perception that I was slower (rather than much faster) but that my "first version" (which might actually be my 300th) was what worked.
The speed would also increase the complexity I could handle - because I could get later things done before the early parts faded from mid-term memory. (Nevertheless I'd comment religiously. Comments are a THIRD way to express the algorithm, again bringing another mode of thought to bear and exposing difficulties. And if someone else needed to maintain or interface with the code - including me a few months later, after I'd forgotten what I'd been doing - they provide an invaluable aid to understanding.)
But I was never able to get this methodology across to other members of the group. In addition to the "three times slower" myth, they'd perceive it as a difference in style: Walking a tree depth-first rather than breadth first (two operations that are roughly equivalent in time in a search, but massively different when applied to coding.) In fact, the so-called "breadth-first" approach - putting a lot of stuff together, then trying to debug it as a lump - lef
Long time no see, dude!
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Actually the Xanadu royalty system is pretty simple. I think it would have been workable. There have been various versions of Xanadu and related royalty schemes, but they all have the property of being flat, and triggered only when actual stuff is fetched.
There are a lot of web pages with links that lead eventually, indirectly out onto most of the web and back to themselves. But your browser is always just fetching certain bytes from certain servers. The royalties would be paid on the fetched bytes when they were fetched, and the rates aren't based on how you got to the page. That is, in Xanadu-like schemes, there are no royalty-splitting, indirect credit calculations or kickbacks. A linker only gets credit if you read his own commentary (e.g. the blue text).
It's not more complicated with inline quoting instead of links: like with images in web pages, quotes would be fetched (at least virtually) from various sources, but still the royalties are being paid to those sources, for only the fetched bytes, as those bytes are fetched.
On Xanadu, the storing, caching, mirroring and credit and royalty handling were all handled by a coordinated distributed network, but looking at the web you can see that letting the individually-owned servers deliver content and charge royalties is also plausible.
Here's one area where Ted left the design deliberately slightly too simple, a solution to 95% of the problem that everyone could understand and either live with or augment with their own designs.
Greets!
t .ac.uk_923.html)
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o n/
So, first things first - I met Ted at The ACM Hypertext conference in Aarhuus in 2001. He gave a keynote and a workshop on ZigZag - which at once seemed totally obvious and very powerful. I played with the ideas for a bit, showed some things to him whilst he was a visting professor at Southampton and have worked with him here at the University of Nottingham before he went off to his current job, at The Oxford Internet Institutehttp://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/. It is a priviledge and an honour to be able to call Ted my friend - he has an incredible mind, a huge vision, and yes, he can code!
I've been working on using ZigZag to represent the deep interrelationships inherent in biological information. We've also been working on ZigZag as a phone/PIM interface and analysing the underlying structures. If you're interested in finding out more, read our published work:
Moore, A.; Goulding, J.O.; Brailsford, T.J.; & Ashman, H. (2004). Practical Applitudes: case studies of applications of the ZigZag hypermedia system. Proceedings of Fifteenth ACM Conference on Hypertext and Hypermedia, August 9-13, 2004, Santa Cruz, CA, USA pp 143-152 (http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1012807.1012851)
Moore, A.; Nelson, T.; Brailsford, T.J.; & Ashman, H. (2004). ZigZag for Bioinformatics. Poster Proceedings of ISMB/ECCB 2004, July 31-August 4, 2004, Glasgow, UK (http://www.iscb.org/ismb2004/posters/axmATcs.not
Moore, A.; & Brailsford, T.J. (2004). Unified Hyperstructures for Bioinformatics: Escaping the Application Prison. Journal of Digital Information: Special Issue on Future Visions of Common-Use Hypertext. Vol.5, Issue 1. Article No. 254, 2004-05-27 (http://jodi.ecs.soton.ac.uk/Articles/v05/i01/Moo
Ted has also published a long paper on the fundamentals of ZigZag:
A Cosmology for a Different Computer Universe: Data Model, Mechanisms, Virtual Machine and Visualization Infrastructure
http://jodi.ecs.soton.ac.uk/Articles/v05/i01/Nels
Finally, come visit our website (link in my profile), look around, ask questions - we're always interested in new ideas!
Adam Moore, Postdoc Researcher, ZigZag for Bioinformatics
The problem with the rat race is, even if you win, you're still a rat!
...and the muses are forced to kill themselves in utter shame and horror.
Slashdot quality declines as the number of hot grits posts decreases. - Provolt's Law, Apr-09-2005
So far slashdot has mentioned it three times in the past several years (including this article).
Ted Nelson Releases Xanadu
Xanadu, ZigZag and Ted Nelson
"Forgetful" would be more like it.
Slashdot quality declines as the number of hot grits posts decreases. - Provolt's Law, Apr-09-2005
One of its key concepts seems to be a sort of visualised, TrackBack of citations and relations, by defualt, to the previous data.
I agree that undo trees would be cool to have in editors, but they have all the problems and issues of version control systems that allow branches (i.e., pretty much all VCSs).
For example, if you want to take some edits from one branch and some from another, you have to worry about conflicting changes to the same object, modifications to an object in one branch that was deleted in another branch, etc. It's certainly possible to handle these problems, but most computer users aren't used to these concepts, and presenting them in a simple, easy-to-understand way is hard.
There were some research projects in the 90s on visualizations and interactions for managing undo trees. I don't think I've ever seen any in a released piece of software (proprietary or OSS). I don't have any links handy, but I know some of the techniques were presented at the ACM UIST symposium.
I think that everybody is in agreement that the Xanadu ideas are great
I don't think that everyone is in agreement. For example, many people don't think the royalty stuff is such a great idea. Just like lots of people don't think DRM today is that great of an idea, and don't want to support or use it.
TN finally opened up the sourcecode for Xanadu under the somewhat bizare name of Udanax.
It's not really that bizarre, considering it's simply Xanadu spelled backwards.
I don't recall how I came across Ted Nelson's book, Computer Lib/Dream Machines mentioned earlier, but it was some time in the early 90's. I believe he has been credited with inventing the phrase "Hypertext". Just the title "Computer Lib" seems to connote a feeling of some kind of 60's movement like Women's Lib, Woodstock, or the Civil Rights Movement in the US, with Ted Nelson as the Timothy Leary of computers. In my opinion, he is possibly a visionary who's contributions may not be given the proper recognition in his lifetime, like those whose names are cluttered throughout history. I'm surprised that he hasn't received more recognition, especially from computer enthusiasts like slashdotters (you!). I think his name should be as recognisable as Linus Trovalds, Steve Jobs, and Bill Gates. And his work deserves a slashdotting if only to get the word out there into the collective consciousness for a brief moment.
Some earlier comments have already brought up information about how his proposed concepts involve a royalty payment system. Given the controversy of displaying contents from other sites in frames, the proposed micropayment system, and digital rights management, it seems his ideas were decades before their time. As much as the term "DRM" causes people to cringe, the missing integration of a royalty payment system with the internet is what has prevented it from being a replacement for print publishing, as well as other forms of media. The web seemed to hold a promise of becoming a repository for literature and information when it first became popular, like a library, but more easily accessible worldwide. However it has yet to fulfill that promise with the available content.
I can recall from what I've read about him that Nelson veered from hierarchical structures of data, choosing instead to have information interconnected in a more free-form fashion, much like the hyperlink interconnections of the web. However, the evolution of the web involving inherently hierarchical data such as SGML and now XML seems to contradict his elusive vision of what the internet should be. He came up with a basic data structure which he called the "enfilade" which would accomplish it, but kept the specifics of the enfilade private. I'm sure it has been implemented in his derivative work, ZigZag, and is now more accessible.
An allegedly less than flattering article published in Wired magazine, also mentioned earlier, gives an inkling of Nelson's possible contributions (I say allegedly because when I read it I actually thought it cast Nelson in a positive light). Xanadu is just the beginning. It is what is needed to organise the cumulative archive of brainstorming work he has done over his lifetime, to make it accessible and usable. Only when technology catches up with his amassed information and allows it to become applicable will his true body of work be recognised. Leonardo da Vinci accumulated 13,000 p
I had a look at the ZigZag article (http://jodi.ecs.soton.ac.uk/Articles/v05/i01/Nels on/).
Looks like Nelson reinvented graphs:
Take a directed graph ("zzstructure"). Its edges ("zzlinks") shall be colored (each color a "zzdimension"). Add the restriction: Each node ("zzcell") may have at most one outgoing ("posward") and at most one incoming ("negward") edge of a color.
So you've got it in a few sentences. And he's right: You can do interesting things with graphs. That's why there is graph theory. And visualizing graphs is interesting, too, and an active research field. Nothing "cosmological" about that.
BTW the "ranks" are the connected components of the shadow of the subgraph of one particular color.
-Edwin