I was just seeing a documentary about him (the Internet actually) by Werner Herzog. It was the first time I had heard about Xanadu or Ted Nelson. His ideas were quite radical from what I know as the Web. And I got to thinking how the web might have been had Xanadu become mainstream.

But then I opened the Wikipedia page on Project Xanadu, it's second paragraph is:

> Wired magazine published an article called "The Curse of Xanadu", calling Project Xanadu "the longest-running vaporware story in the history of the computer industry".[2] The first attempt at implementation began in 1960, but it was not until 1998 that an incomplete implementation was released. A version described as "a working deliverable", OpenXanadu, was made available in 2014.

So... I don't know what to make of it.

1980s is not "mid 20th century".