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

Ted Nelson is brilliant but insane.

[Chip Salzenberg]

There will never be one knowledge network with one administrative body. That's what Xanadu was supposed to be.

I do wish I had editors that kept historical trees instead of a single undo chain, though.

Could Xanadu demonstrate prior art?

[earthforce_1]

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.

Why Xanadu died

[rewt66]

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.

Re:Why Xanadu died

[d1v1d3byz3r0]

The web is not good enough. The web is nowhere near good enough. The web is based on a very weak hypertext system: HTML. As far as hypertext systems go, HTML it is a quick and dirty solution to a much more complex problem. Beyond that, we now have XML, which is an even quicker and dirtier solution to the same complex problem.

The problem I'm talking about is symbolically linking context. It's very hard to do this with strings because strings are linear and context is not. For instance, in HTML, if I wanted to link you to an article on Wittgenstein, I write an A HREF tag around some text. Physically, that tag and that text are part of one big symbol that is parsed in to smaller symbols: a string parsed into substrings, and some of those substrings (when enclosed in < >) just so happen to be a link to some other big string of text.

But that's a horrible solution for several reasons. Firstly, I can only link one thing at a time. If I had a phrase "you should read these books on Wittgenstein" and I wanted to link the phrase "books on Wittgenstein" to several pieces of information on each book, the word "books" to information on books in general, and "Wittgenstein" to information about Wittgenstein, I can't do that. Why is that? Because there's no physical separation of form and function. Content and context exist in the same stream, and that's just asking for trouble.

Secondly, HTML is linear. Personally, I believe that the heart of this problem lies in the misapplication of the string. Fundamentally, what is a string? It's a linked list of characters. It's linear. This works very well for written and spoken language because they are both a linear stream of symbols. However, thought is not linear; context is not linear; and most importantly, comprehension is not linear. Those things are all non-linear. Why? Because the brain is non-linear.

This is the virtue of real hypertext. Hypertext seeks to address this issue. Hypertext addresses the non-linearity of ideas by expanding speech and literature into a multi-dimensional space. But HTML is to restrictive to really accommodate this. Sometimes that non-linearity expands into two dimensions, sometimes it expands into five. But HTML seeks to collapse it into a two-dimensional map always. Of course, you can have maps to other maps ("animal" to "mammal" to "dolphin"), but this design is inefficient. Furthermore, the links have limited cardinality ("there is no native support for two-way references or many-to-many links"). These are all significant burdens to the structure of the web.

I would suggest that we are not where we need to be and that HTML is only the beginning of real hypertextual technology. I was unfamiliar with the Xanadu project, but I personally find it very refreshing and relevant that this article was posted. I think many of the ideas are still capable of being implemented in new hypertext systems.

prior art patent nullifier

[Anonymous Coward]

Is this enough to invalidate all of the hypertext/html-like markup language patents?

Ah, yes Xanadu

[hey!]

Everything is deeply intertwingled.

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.

The Elohim Destroyed Xanadu?

[Baldrson]

During some rocket engine work with Roger Gregory I discussed the failure of the Xanadu project with him a few times. He mentioned something as a major contributing factor, if not _the_ major contributing factor, to the fall of the Xanadu project that I haven't seen mentioned anywhere else. Maybe I misunderstood him but if not, it wouldn't be the first time I ran across some crucial history of a major technological development project that hadn't made the press. (See my transistor and fusion links for examples.)

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.

Ted Nelson

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

He never understood that the perfect was the enemy of the good...

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.

Good news!

[Spy der Mann]

When someone tries to patent "hyperlinks", we can show them prior art! :P

File it away with the Dymaxion car,

[dpbsmith]

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.