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Xanadu: The Forgotten Hypertext

Posted by timothy on from the man-with-the-ultimate-demo dept.

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."

4 of 261 comments (clear)

  1. Ted Nelson is brilliant but insane. by Chip+Salzenberg · · Score: 5, Insightful
    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.

  2. Could Xanadu demonstrate prior art? by earthforce_1 · · Score: 4, Insightful


    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.
  3. Ah, yes Xanadu by hey! · · Score: 4, Insightful
    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.
    --
    Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
  4. Ted Nelson by Jeremiah+Cornelius · · Score: 4, Insightful
    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.

    --
    "Flyin' in just a sweet place,
    Never been known to fail..."