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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
Do all Xanadu programmers look like Olivia Newton John?
"Nature bats last..."
Oh, boy, Al Gore is going to be pissed off...
shhhh...must..not..remember!!
eBayDig 1s a typo saerch engien
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.
Google Cache works just fine.
: xanadu.com.au/ted/XUsurvey/xuDation.html+xuDation. html&hl=en
For those afraid to click: http://64.233.167.104/search?q=cache:GAPPZoUBZYgJ
-theGreater.
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
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...)
Now with linkage!
Thanks, preview button!
Happiness is like peeing yourself. Everybody can see it but only you can feel its warmth.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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..."
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