Upvoted in the hope someone will explain this to me
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 ...
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.
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.
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.
Previous discussion of xanadu in general
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10642143 6 comments
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7849389 100 comments