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

Was.

[GillBates0]

WAS alive. Thank you /..

Re:Was.

[nairb774]

I as looking to see what this was all about. Anyone with other resources or mirrors? Doubt the mirrors due to the time the server stood up. nairb774

Re:Was.

[khallow]

You know, we ought to get some kickback from the /. admins for providing web euthanasia services.

Re:Was.

[AndroidCat]

The last access that brought it down was by some guy from Porlock.

Re:Was.

[moonbender]

Some information: Wikipedia on Project Xanadu

Re:Was.

[narcc]

If no one ever reads the articles ... What really causes a slashdoting?

Xanadu enthusiasts?

Movie reference

[ectotherm]

Do all Xanadu programmers look like Olivia Newton John?

Ohhhh

[Hawthorne01]

So *that's* what happened to ELO and Olivia Newton-John.

Gene Kelly deserved better than to be in that crapfest.

So the web was invented earlier than we thought?

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, boy, Al Gore is going to be pissed off...

please don't awaken xanadu

[corpsiclex]

...is still alive, although largely forgotten

shhhh...must..not..remember!!

Forgotten due to the emergence of the Web...

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, it was largely forgotten due to the performance of the Olivia Newton John.

Re:Forgotten due to the emergence of the Web...

[eno2001]

performance of the Olivia Newton John.

From what I hear, the performance of the Olivia Newton John (ONJ) was actually pretty high when compared to the early Pentiums. Sure it was a 16-bit processor with limited access to RAM, but for it's day, it had some truly unique innovations. Now... the performance of the Kylie Minogue is another thing entirely. That processor completely kicks the ass of even the lowly Itanium and Opteron processors. I, for one welcome our Aussie Pop Diva overclocked overlords. (That's overladies to you)

An old protocol..

[grub]

xanadu://olivia.newton-john

Not forgotten...ignored

[Anonymous Coward]

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...

Re:Not forgotten...ignored

[tricorn]

The biggest problem he seemed to have was that he wanted to make sure everyone would get paid the appropriate royalties for each little bit. Click a link to a commentary about a paragraph, you pay micro-cents to the person who wrote the original paragraph, the person who wrote the commentary, and the person who created the link that you used to get there. Without all that, the system would have already been done by now.

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.

Re:Ted Nelson is brilliant but insane.

[virid]

I would imagine it would have to be visually. Perhaps a menu system showing you the edit choices. After you hilight the selection another menu could provide the continuing branches, etc.

Once you've finalized your edit it would probably be helpful to have something keeping track of final edits, allowing you to revert to prior edits.

Interesting but complex. It certainly wouldn't be your average editor.

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.

Olivia Neutron Bomb / Electric Link Orchestra

[Tackhead]

A dream, where Ted Nelson dared to go,
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...)

Re:Olivia Neutron Bomb / Electric Link Orchestra

[sconeu]

In Xanadu did Ted Nelson
A stately hypertext decree
Where yet the mighty bandwidth ran
Through usage measureless to man...

Re:Wiki Info

[Pirogoeth]

Now with linkage!

Thanks, preview button!

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.

BT

[mgs1000]

So does this infringe on British Telecom's hypertext patent from the eighties? :)

The utter irony

[AtariAmarok]

"Yeah. Let's invent hypertext linking! We'll be forgotten until some future year when we are rediscovered, and someone unwittingly destroys all record of our efforts.... by hyperlinking to us."

Anyone know if Samuel Colt was shot to death or not?

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.

Very much alive

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

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.

Re:Could Xanadu demonstrate prior art?

[Ohreally_factor]

I don't know the particulars, but according to wikipedia, something like this occured in 1988 when Ted released the source code to Xanadu as Project Udanax, to help overturn some patents. Unfortunately, wikipedia provides no further detail on the case(s). I'm not sure if Xanadu had any impact on the BT hyperlink patent case, for instance.

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.

Keith Henson Needs Help

[Anonymous Coward]

SEE: http://www.keithhenson.org/

from: kuro5hin.org || technology and culture, from the trenches

Keith Henson Needs Help (MLP)
By Baldrson
Wed Sep 15th, 2004 at 07:42:14 AM EST

For those who don't know him, Keith Henson co-founded the L5 Society, was
President of Xanadu Corporation and was a featured character in The Great
Mambo Chicken and the Transhuman Condition: Science Slightly Over the Edge.
He's about to be deported from Canada to the United States where he faces
time in the infamous California prison system.

Recently on the cryonics mailing list Keith Henson issued a plea for help:
... at this point I am a "failed refugee." The only thing that can keep me
from being deported to the US on short notice is an appeal to the Minister
of Citizenship and Immigration. Her office gets 15,000 letters a week so it
takes a well known case to reach the level where it gets attention.
What is going on here and why should anyone care?

The short story is that Keith has been fighting against Scientology and as
a result ended up fleeing the United States to Canada to avoid a
misdemeanor conviction brought against him by Scientologists. Here's the
prosecuting attorney's speech given the jury on the charges:
Now, His Honor read to you in the beginning of the case that the defendant
has been charged with three counts. First count is -- now, these are
numeric numbers and they mean nothing to you, so I will give you names for
what they are. The first one is 422, violation of Penal Code Section 422.
And 664/422 and 422.6. Now I'll give them names. 422 is terrorist threats.
Now, that conjures up images of Beruit or the Twin Towers bombing, but
that's not what it means. It just means a threat that causes someone
terror, that frightens people. That's what Count One is. Count two is
664/422, is the attempt, the attempt to do the exact same thing, to cause
to threaten, to attempt to threaten and cause terror or frighten someone.
And the last count is 422.6. And that's essentially defined as the
interference with someone's rights guaranteed by the Constitution, their
civil rights, and in this case the right to practice their religion without
fear. Essentially 422.6 is a hate crime. Now, let's talk about the first
count, and we'll go count by count. The first count, 422, again I told you
was just threats that caused people to be afraid. Essentially the elements
are these: Number one, there has to be somewhat of a threat. There has to
be a threat. The person has to intend there to be a threat. And lastly,
that the victims have a reasonable fear. However, the person doesn't have
to have to want to carry it out. There has to be no intention to carry out
the threat.
Keith's been in Canada for a few years and is trying to remain there as a
refugee.

Well, I'll confess my bias. Although Keith and I have known each other
since the early days of the L5 Society, we have serious disagreements on a
lot of things -- not the least of which are many opinions about Jews, genes
and memes etc. More immediately relevant is the fact that I just don't
"get" Keith's fight against Scientology. Scientologists seem like a joke to
me and IMHO people who get involved with them suffer about as much but no
more than people who get involved with New York City nightlife.

Be that as it may, I personally don't like seeing anyone spend time in a
US, let alone California, prison system.

I once refused to testify against a young Hispanic after he had stolen my
car because, despite the fact that he would be more protected than a man of
my ethnicity in a California prison, he would nevertheless be subjected to
a substantial likelihood of being "punked out". That's not my idea of
justice. Keith is an old guy -- unlikely to be punked out despite the fact
that he's a non-violent 'white guy' -- bu

Ted's book

[ch-chuck]

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).

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.

There was an Open Source version mentioned on /.

[jd]

TN finally opened up the sourcecode for Xanadu under the somewhat bizare name of Udanax. This was covered in a /. story a few years back.

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, ....) don't.

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.

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

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

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

What the… xand??? Xandau??

[jspoon]

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.

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.

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.

Douglas Adams Documentary

[guzzloid]

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/

Not centralized

[Steve Witham]

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.