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."

Comments

Re:Unable to connect

[theGreater]

Google Cache works just fine.

For those afraid to click: http://64.233.167.104/search?q=cache:GAPPZoUBZYgJ: xanadu.com.au/ted/XUsurvey/xuDation.html+xuDation. html&hl=en

-theGreater.

here are some alternate links

[a11]

http://www.cs.brown.edu/memex/ACM_HypertextTestbed /papers/60.html

http://64.233.167.104/search?q=cache:gdhB0XBfAdsJ: xanadu.com/+xanadu&hl=en

Xanadu associations

[AtariAmarok]

Xanadu associations:

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.

links galore

[ink_polaroid]

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.

An excellent Wired article about this

[freshmkr]

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.

Not ignored - not appreciated.

[fatbuddha]

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

Open Transmedia (nee Xanadu): Still-Born

[ewhac]

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

Re:Was.

[moonbender]

Some information: Wikipedia on Project Xanadu

As long as we're free associating...

[fm6]

No, they look like romantic poets who've had too much laudanum.

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.
-- Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Xanadu

How Xanadu influenced the development of the Web

[lzeltser]

If you're interested in learning how Ted Nelson's Xanadu influenced the development of the Web, take a look at the paper I wrote a few years ago:

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.