Xanadu
xanadu.com
xanadu.com
It is interesting alternative to "what could have been", and inspired the imagination of technologists in the 70s (I believe).
It featured some unique elements: - subdivision of "documents" so that sections (sentences, paragraphs) can be folded in from other sources. Somewhat similar to remote CDNs for images, but did chunks of text (e.g. when quoting another article) - UI: being able to see multiple documents at the same time and how they connect to each other. (Not the same as annotation, but if you can imagine seeing annotations on the side of the screen... something like that) - greater similarity to the Memex in how information can be interlinked and displayed. - in built royalty mechanism. (Micro payments) - files are stored centrally in a docuverse, which is somewhat similar to a block chain in that there is an agreed interpretation of what a document "is" instead of having multiple copies of the same document.
Ultimately, the World aside Web came along and filled the need for a document publishing medium, rendering Xanadu a historical artifact, many of whose ideas have been realized by other projects in other forms.
Wikipedia entry here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu
Also worth reading is Literary Machines, since that's an interesting historical read of how people were thinking about uses for computers.
If you want to understand the technology behind it, consider that there have been two incomplete implementations: Udanax Green and Udanax Gold: https://web.archive.org/web/20090226223053/http://www.udanax... (the domain udanax.com now seems now to be used by someone else).
The first was based on a data structure called "Enfilade" (http://www.sunless-sea.net/wiki/EntTheory), which was invented by Roger Gregory (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Gregory_(programmer)). Xanadu Gold was based on a data structure called "Ent", which is much more complicated and was according to http://xanadu.com/tech/ invented by K. Eric Drexler. Understand Enfilades before trying to understand Ents.
The best overview of an Ent that I could find (seems incomplete, though) is https://web.archive.org/web/20071027094309/http://www.sunles...
I revisit Xanadu every couple of years. For its time, its "closed" architecture seemed reasonable. How else would one implement persistent two-way links? Once you kinda grasp Xanadu, kludges like pingbacks and link liveness checkers seem ridiculous.
Alas, Ted Nelson, like myself, didn't anticipate, or was slow to fully appreciate, how DNS, HTTP, URL/URI would up-end the world. Whatever else was going on with Nelson, Xanadu, Autodesk, whatever, "the web" tsunami obliterated competing notions.
Animats' comment (below) about git (eg github) being today's closest realization of the Xanadu ideal is insightful.
That's a great example of a concrete implementation detail - unbreakable links means a central link database - that has significant implications in the shape of the vision. For example the only way I can think of to do unbreakable links but also distributed is an immutable public ledger perhaps something like a blockchain. And now we can talk about specifics like what other properties does a blockchain implementation shape? What does a database app with HTML forms and such look like? But did Nelson understand this? Can anyone cite an implementation source that goes into Nelson's analysis of this stuff?
I don't know how Xanadu was supposed to work on the inside. I do have a dim vague memory of seeing a mailing-list post many years later in response to someone seeking the earliest prior art on using content hashes for a distributed content-addressable store -- from someone in Xanadu. That's all I got in my memory. I want to say they also mentioned Merkle trees, but I may be confabulating. (I'd be surprised if Miller didn't know Merkle personally -- they both worked with Eric Drexler, and Drexler invented his ent just a few years after Merkle patented his tree.)
Robin Hanson published a paper back then with a non-Xanadu design sketch with similar goals: http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=43938 but it's paywalled. (Hanson also got involved with Xanadu for a little while.)
The currently dominating platform gives the impression that "closed" has won nowadays.
With Xanadu he had very clear ideas, for example, about documents that link to each other (even down to the paragraph/word/character level) and are able to preserve their integrity even in the face of edits, and his collaborators were able to come up with quite brilliant technical solutions. Nelson had a lot of working prototypes made up throughout the years.
One crucial problem was that a Xanadu-style system was a closed system; in a distributed world, the same implementation would have had to be run by every single server. It was diametrically opposite in philosophy to what became the World Wide Web, with its "anything goes" URL scheme, and it was a very clear case of "worse is better" winning over a carefully designed, walled-garden ivory-tower kind of solution.
Of course, Xanadu was completely prescient about link integrity. There was a rather sad post on HN recently about an late-1990s book which had lots of URLs to resources, none of which worked.
Apparently there's some old demo version, but...
http://xanadu.com/xuspViewer.html "Unfortunately this made it a very complicated package, eventually too tangled to improve further, and Rob had to get on to other things. "
So one volunteer (Rob) who actually made a working demo some years ago wrote spaghetti code that couldn't scale. That's as close as they can get to working software in decades? Granted the system they propose is difficult to grasp and likely math-heavy, but I don't see it as multiple-decades difficult given the progress computing has made in that time.
The more I read about Nelson and Xanadu, the more it seems like the people backing it have no desire to interact with reality. It's as if they expect their grand ideas, simply by virtue of being grand, will naturally create a viable product on their own somehow, and the "low work" of creating a viable product with a market is somehow beneath them.
So it's a lot more than just visionary talk, and a little more than just design.
At least in the form that many people consider "working demos".
Not everyone can, needs to, or wants to code. The ideas a person can express shouldn't be limited by the wood they can whittle. There are many game and ux folks who envision systems w/o having demos. They story board, animate or write Haiku.
Ideas don't take over the world, implementations of them do. Playing around with concepts is all well and good, but don't gripe when you can't demonstrate its usefulness and no one cares.
Some ideas need to shown, some can be told. Some people are really lousy at telling stories. Vastly more people can code than think creatively.
Citation needed.
Kidding aside, is this paper [0] the source for your quote? Thanks
[0] https://www.princeton.edu/~reddings/pubpapers/PathDepIER2002...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Otlet
He had an idea for a sort of world library/scholarly citadel called The Mundaneum - I wonder what he would've made of computers. Sadly, Wikipedia says that the project lost funding from Belgium a bit before they were invaded by Germany, who broke a lot of it.
Some of the features you mention could perhaps be useful if implemented in a browser extension, e.g. the ability to see/preview linked documents inline. It is useful in IDE's for code navigation, so perhaps also in a browser.
https://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/FAQ.html
Q: Do you have had mixed emotions about "cashing in" on the Web?
A: Not really. It was simply that had the technology been proprietary, and in my total control, it would probably not have taken off. The decision to make the Web an open system was necessary for it to be universal. You can't propose that something be a universal space and at the same time keep control of it.
Xanadu assumes that documents are stored on append-only structure: they never disappear, and instead of updating the document, one just publishes a new version (with all the text from the previous ones was still available). See for example http://www.xanadu.com.au/ted/XUsurvey/xuDation.html figures 9/10 and then figure 16. Later, there is a reference to cache, but with no details whatsoever: "... content may be cached in many places, as long as it has the same permanent IDs..."
I have no idea how is this supposed work in the real life. Today, the static web hosting is dirt cheap, but back in 90's it was $20/mo for just a few megabytes. In a Xanadu world, what would happen once you no longer pay for service?
In general, I get the impression that Xanadu was designed for a world run by five mainframes and it was never really able to adapt to the Internet.
I bet that someday we will move to a distributed web hosted on something like the blockchain, with redundancy and revision history, and that will begin to resemble Xanadu. It reminds me of sort of a "Star Trek" vision of how things should be, but not how things actually are in this disorganized world.
I think that it's sort of like the Dynabook or early AI or VR, in that it's the correct vision of the ideal result of a technology, but was way too ahead of its time and the technology just wasn't ready.
Well, there's that.
discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4577865
His "Computers for Cynics" series was entertaining to me. He's a sharp guy with strong opinions and an engaging speaker.
He doesn't post a lot and I see that I have some catching-up to do.
I didn't realize he just turned 80 a few weeks ago. I'll be interested to see the videos of the "Ted's 80th birthday show" at The Internet Archive.
Printed: https://archive.org/stream/galaxymagazine-1956-07/Galaxy_195...
Audio: https://archive.org/details/pra-BB3830.08
"The story tells of a representative of the expansionist, imperialistic culture of the planet Kit Carson, and his encounter with the deceptively pastoral culture of Xanadu."
The story is about the social effect of wearable networked computers that can exchange knowledge -- very prescient for 1956!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu
Looks like this is their latest demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72M5kcnAL-4
The fact that they seem to be so interested in things like "who pays when you mix and match copyrighted content?" instead of "how do we get people to try out our system?" indicates that it's not going to be in widespread production use anytime soon...
I knew that crowd when Autodesk was funding them. They were fanatical libertarians. The solution to everything is a market.
Ted Nelson was focused on text to the exclusion of images. That didn't help. He also had strong ideas about how the internal database should be organized, down to the database implementation level, which didn't help either, because they were 1960s database technology.[1]
The closest thing to Xanadu in wide use today is Github. One central place for all public code. Anything can be changed but the history and old versions remain. Full tracking of who changed what. The ability to create a completely new document from an old one while retaining tracking. There's no micropayment system, of course.
The real conceptual failure was not realizing that the future was ad-supported.
It was completely separate from Autodesk. Xanadu had offices on California Avenue in Palo Alto; Autodesk was in Marin County. Autodesk was quite good at getting working software out the door, but that didn't reach Xanadu.
Lack of an identified market was a big problem. One market that was considered was financial newsletters. There are lots of expensive newsletters you can buy which have extremely detailed coverage of something important to traders, such as what's happening at the Henry Hub or the Port of Rotterdam or in the Bahamas. These cost $50-$1000 a month. ("Offshore Alert", which covers scams run from tiny island countries, "Platts Oil Letter", which is now a big service, and the Dines Letter, for the gold bugs.) There was no centralized distribution for these, and they had tiny circulations. That didn't go anywhere. All of those are now on the Web as subscription products.
It was more the development process that I was thinking of - the actual production of software, a working system. I take your point that Autodesk's programmers could certainly produce software. I was wondering if the Xanadu project was seen by Autodesk perhaps as a bit of a 'moon-shot', in the sense of low probability of success coupled with great potential.
Yes, it was.
Autodesk has done a few of those. They were into virtual reality very early, before 1990. It turned out that doing CAD with gloves and goggles was like trying to paint wearing oven mitts. Precise positioning is tough. So they gave up on that.
Getting into 3D animation worked out better. Autodesk itself did 3D Studio, and gradually acquired other 3D animation companies as they got into trouble. This worked out well, and there was crossover with the CAD business. The really good radioiosity renderer from one of the animation programs was connected to an architectural design program. Now you could place real light fixtures from a library and see the result before building the building and embedding light fixtures in concrete.
Carl Bass, as CEO until last February, was into 3D printing. He thought home 3D printing was going to be a much bigger deal than it turned out to be. So Autodesk came out with several low-end CAD programs that were never very profitable and did a lot of work to make 3D printing easier. Not profitable. Bass is gone.
Autodesk keeps plugging away at boring but useful stuff. Market cap around $25 billion.
(I'm long out of Autodesk, although still a stockholder.)
This is a bit like describing Galileo as "the jackass who wouldn't shut up about heliocentrism despite having no answer to the stellar parallax objection". By no means has he ever been right about everything, and he has been his own worst enemy in several ways, but ...
The second is putting a payment processor on EVERY query. You want Internet for the Richies- this is how you get it. Of course, there's hand-wavey garbage that says 'everyone would contribute and nobody would owe anyone anything'.
Seriously, IPFS is the best way forward here. Links never change its content (but can still die if noone has the content). And no payment processor is there unless you want to pay other people to pin (read: seed) content.
(To see this post, please pay $0.02)
Edit: Seriously? multiple -1's in a row? I'd love to hear rebuttals if I'm wrong, or a further discussion. If you've read the Xanadu documents, then you'd know that the basis of this is a "Secure Environment and Secure Identification" of computers. AKA: DRM.
Isn't that what we effectively have, with so much of the Internet's value either locked in Facebook's garden or beholden to Google?
I understand where you're coming from with the DRM criticism, but IMO the primary fault in Xanadu's version is that it's an attempt at naïve mom&pop capitalism in a digital world that already is owned by plutocrats wealthy and powerful beyond Rockefellers' dreams.
No, because you can download the entirety of Wikipedia, including its edit history and discussion.
Also, you can download a not insignificant number of primary sources through both sci-hub and various other sources like Project Gutenberg, IMSLP, etc.
Add to that all the things that swell to prominence on Bittorrent trackers whenever the Streisand effect is in play.
I have a hard time seeing that content disappearing any time soon. But I also have a hard time seeing how that content would have been aggregated in the first place if you had little micropayment barriers between all the things.
And now, I do just that. Except there's no money changing hands. That's open source for you. Now, if Xanadu's ideas did come to fruition, then I would expect everything to have a paywall on it. And the worst/regular experience would be pages of pages of aggregate sentences, with each few words being a cent or 2. The pages themselves would be >$1 each to download. Instead of trying to trick browsers and people into spyware - it would be tricking people into automatic slow-reloading links that would cost a few cents... And would continuously reload treating unsuspecting users like a piggy bank.
Instead, the world we have is free by default. Only if something is deemed to cost a lot is there a paywall. Things under that threshold use advertising, which is slowly beginning to fail at the seams. That's because content is expensive, but copying isnt.
(BTW, my points on the main post are still yoyo-ing around 0 and 1. I wish people would respond rather than try to hide my commentary.)
Yeah, we'd make our fistful of dollar bills, and simultaneously owing 5 to 10x that.
At least for the most part, getting hit with malware just means bitcoin miners, DDoS, adverts, or the like. If we were in Xanadu-Universe, then malware would be real cash.
The main difference to web hypertext as we know it is that it doesn't just link documents together by what we know as "links", but it's bidirectional and with more content inclusion. E.g. if someone takes content from another document and puts it in their article, the text is connected to the source document (instead of them maybe putting a link to the source). And from the source document you can find all documents that used parts of it.
Project Xanadu is Nelson's repeated attempts to make this work, while the world choose the WWW model and is happy enough with that (much to the disdain of Xanadu supporters, who believe the WWW to be a vastly inferior and broken approach). Once HTML took off, there wasn't really a chance to catch up, especially not with the limited resources they have. Lot's of bitterness about that, which also means they haven't really tried to make their ideas work with the web and rather aiming for an uncompromising, pure implementation of their ideas.
Presume I am dead if I ever stop reposting this.
http://web.archive.org/web/20001101230424/http://www2.educ.k...
http://web.archive.org/web/20001003011753/http://xanadu.com....
along with it.
Previous discussion of xanadu in general
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10642143 6 comments
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7849389 100 comments
Now the question is "Is the design feasible to scale?" I'm working toward building a xanalogical system using Udanax Green as a design reference and after 9 months of working on it, I'm convinced the design will scale.
I'm using RDF backend store for the links/endsets. SPARQL/RDF is easily distributed so there is no need to centralize. I'm using IPFS for images.
I'm currently working on a custom browser for viewing, publishing and editing.
There is still a lot to do but you can check it the source. https://github.com/sisbell/oulipo
Off-topic: Did anyone else sit down to watch Citizen Kane, purportedly the best movie ever, and come out of the experience ridiculously underwhelmed?
The techniques Welles developed for Kane were innovative at the time, but are now mundane or clichéd. In terms of writing, framing, lighting, directing, editing, scoring, it was unparalleled.
It's not the best movie in the conventional sense, and maybe not even a particularly good one - I found that the story itself failed to grip me - but it is technically brilliant, and one of the most significant movies in terms of its influence on the art of film-making.
I don't remember the source, but there's a quote to the effect of "I don't think much of Shakespeare's plays, they're just one cliché after another".
To start again, what do you think I mean by the term 'semantic web'? If you're not sure, I'm happy to try and explain.
Huge, foolish, excess. Once completed, unable to give it's creator happiness. Not a perfect metaphor, but it gets you thinking.
OT, but Kane is definitely worth watching. Probably enjoy it more if you don't go in to it expecting "the greatest film ever".
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/master-pancake-theater-communit... - click details if the info panel isn't open.
You are aware that Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof were (among others) the founders of the terrorist group RAF (Rote Armee Fraktion - Red Army Faction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Army_Faction), which according to https://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Rote_Armee_Frakti... (German article) murdered 33 people and did lots of other crimes? And (same German Wikipedia article) "Baader-Meinhof-Bande" ("Baader-Meinhof gang") or "Baader-Meinhof-Gruppe" ( "Baader-Meinhof group") was its former unofficial name? You are also aware that the RAF was the reason for the "German Autumn" (https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=German_Autumn&old...), in which there was a giant witch hunt against potential RAF sympathizers and lots of constitutional rights were abolished, which makes the German Autumn a large turning point in history for anybody who is interested about the history of privacy rights an Germany or is even a privacy advocate?
* micropayments for authors * immutable revision history * persistent bi-directional links * transclusions (quotes connected to the original source) instead of copies
Judging from "Computer Lib / Dream Machines," he obviously knows his stuff. I suspect he just doesn't like programming.
I think his biggest problem was that a lot of his goals were too big for the technology of the time. Even with distributed version control, blockchains, and cloud computing we're not there yet, but we are closer than we were.