OpenXanadu
xanadu.com
xanadu.com
I say all this not to be a dick, mind you, but to point out that when something has been vapoware for decades that maybe it's time to ignore the guy who's at the heart of it and, if there's anything useful in it, move on without him. The world did that as far as hypertext goes. Now if only the world could do that with GNU.
What do you mean? GNU is not vaporware, many people use it on top of Linux. Do you mean GNU/Hurd?
It's worth noting that Brenda Laurel, Alan Kay, Nelson, and Seymour Papert had, "art" backgrounds. The future of computing will effectively be led by people with these cross-sectional skills. There's a reason programmers are shitty at designing software.
My takeaway was, that it never went anywhere, because the chief architect is a non technical person, not understanding the technical limits, but having a great ego and therefore was very hard to work with.
I do admire the basic vision (minus royalty), but I think it would take a new, clean and clear approach of designing, to make it actual usable. The way it is, it looks to me like a very early proof of concept, which is not much after all of those years.
If this were a forum, instead of a plantation, I could post selections from it, and you could see for yourself.
It is ridiculous. Going by the "Computer Lib" book, and when it was published, it's obvious that Ted knows enough about how computers work, and has had more than enough time to write the thing all by himself--if his only problems were programming ones.
In a way, I am glad he failed. A Google-scale Google is bad enough. Adding a Google-scale Elsevier into the mix is not a plus.
Also, Xanadu was always intended to be a federated network of individually owned backend servers, not a centralised network. So neither the Google nor the Elsevier model. The idea behind including micropayments was to attempt to encourage existing rightsholders to participate in the pre-granted permission transcoopyright ecosystem so that people can easily make remixes using the majority of our culture that is currently locked up, not just the portion of it available under permissive licences.
Going by his own writings, his zealous consistency on trademark/copyright/credit, the limits of the technology (until blockchain) at the time... any micro-payments system coming out of that was destined to be more Lexis-Nexis than anything resembling decentralization, regardless of whatever Ted's intentions are.
And most of that "locked up" culture is garbage in the first place--the 100th starwars novel, the 25th tom clancy book, the latest nutrition or psychology paper that has been p-hacked to hell and back for the benefit of some commercial interest. Money doesn't attract creativity. Money attracts whores. So in addition to "SEO Experts" optimizing PageRank, we'd have Xanadu Experts gaming that system as well, and it would be just as full of garbage as Google is. Money would surely change hands, but to the pewds & mr beasts of XanaduSpace.
do you realize it's our economic system and the perversion of technology to literally criminalize cooperation and the sharing of information (intellectual property regime (read the book Abolish Silicon Valley by Wendy Liu for more) for one of two groups of people (workers and owners)?
> Maybe it's just me
normalization of an anti-human economy starts from day -9 months (i.e. health/ill-health of the human organism starts and depends on the health of the mother). what has the 'modern world' got to offer those who don't have clean drinking water due to imperialist systems?
At the time Ted conceived his visionary ideas, the magazines were full of pictures of guys in suits standing in front of secretaries typing into screenless hardware, and business machines with racks of IBM tape-reels. There was little non-corporate networking (except for the beginnings of PLATO), and only dreamers talked of making all information available to everyone. Wikipedia is a kludge by comparison.
If you have a local copy of everything referenced, none of your links break.
All content is already copyrighted by the author(s), and in order to publish it on the Xanadu network they have to agree to publish it under transcopyright which grants prior permission to transclude it. That does not preclude also offering the same content elsewhere under different license terms, but revoking the original license agreement would require the content be removed from the Xanadu network. IANAL but I suspect people might have some rights to rely on the original license unless properly notified that the rightsholder had revoked it.
All Xanadu content is append-only versioned, so if someone gets hacked and content is changed, nobody is obligated to transclude from the altered version. They can continue to transclude earlier versions.
The technology became cheap enough that such a business model was unnecessary. Although it was considered in the early days of the Web. Early thinking was that you'd have to subscribe to everything, and there would be charges on your Internet bill for each service, like cable TV. You'd pay to subscribe to a search engine. The New York Times went that route successfully, but few others did.
I knew some of the people behind Xanadu in the 1980s. They were mostly everything-is-a-market libertarians.
God bless that crazy bastard. We used to make Americans so well.
If it is useful to me, then incentive modelling would suggest I should pay. If I get useless information, then I won't want to pay. If I get advertising, then they should pay.
But how do I tell what value I will extract from it before I have read it? Information/concepts/ideas are not like physical objects at all.
There might be ways to help with that, by free trial of x amount of words etc. but this would be hard to consistently implement.
Also, there is clearly information so dense, it is way more valuable, than some shallow, mindless post.
So the creators would have to up a price for every sentence? And the readers get that information, before they read and link?
Alltogether just way too complicated and impractical.
https://xanadu.com/xuTco.html is Ted's most recent thoughs on thematter.
Ted once called me a libertarian, and I immediately set him straight. Not even close, dude.
That's just a few seconds of clicking around in systems like this. It's like surfing with a fucking jetpak.
Spend a few minutes with the demo and try to, "feel" the concept. I would pay huge amounts of money to have all my research materials, "Xanadu'd." (Anyone looking to be hired?)
That day coins failed us.
> […] Come 1992, the “resources of Autodesk” were still funding “talent of the Xanadu team” which had not, as of that date, produced anything remotely like a production prototype—in fact, nothing as impressive as the 88.1x prototype which existed before Autodesk invested in Xanadu. On August 21, 1992 Autodesk decided to pull the plug and give its interest in Xanadu back to the Xanadudes.
(Quoted from footnote linked from this page: https://www.fourmilab.ch/autofile/e5/chapter2_64.html)
It seems like folks here are skeptical, but... we're seeing a growing trend towards this. Nevermind the origins of hypertext, look at the more modern timeline:
- tiddlywiki encouraging bite-sized references that stack on top of each other in one view - The growing popularity of digital zettelkasten(s?) such as Roam or Obsidian. Backlink views and embedding snippets are at least similar. - Finally, the block protocol: https://blockprotocol.org/
Is this going to be something where people look back on this and say "if only it had been understood earlier, we'd have had $whatever_is_after_block_protocol sooner" ?
Yes, in the July, 1945 issue of "The Atlantic", the editor prefixes "As We May Think" with this:
As Director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, Dr. Vannevar Bush has coordinated the activities of some six thousand leading American scientists in the application of science to warfare. In this significant article he holds up an incentive for scientists when the fighting has ceased. He urges that men of science should then turn to the massive task of making more accessible our bewildering store of knowledge. For years inventions have extended man's physical powers rather than the powers of his mind. Trip hammers that multiply the fists, microscopes that sharpen the eye, and engines of destruction and detection are new results, but not the end results, of modern science. Now, says Dr. Bush, instruments are at hand which, if properly developed, will give man access to and command over the inherited knowledge of the ages. The perfection of these pacific instruments should be the first objective of our scientists as they emerge from their war work. Like Emerson's famous address of 1837 on "The American Scholar," this paper by Dr. Bush calls for a new relationship between thinking man and the sum of our knowledge. — THE EDITOR
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-may-think/303881/The link goes to an example. The front page of the site says the following, whish doesn't help much:
The computer world is not just technicality and razzle-dazzle. It is a continual war over software politics and paradigms. With ideas which are still radical, WE FIGHT ON.
We hope for vindication, the last laugh, and recognition as an additional standard-- electronic documents with visible connections.
We propose a new kind of writing-- PARALLEL PAGES, VISIBLY CONNECTED.
Xanadu has a lot of interesting ideas and Nelson is a visionary, though the idea to visually link works just doesn't work. However, transclusion is an important idea, that is critical for Wikipedia's style of evolution, and will be important as Wikidata and other linked data (semantic web) applications get off the ground.
However, the vast majority of the web consists of cheap short cut web sites that aren't much different than dial up systems. AKA start up money grabbing culture trying to carve up every little idea into a unicorn. And once they start carving things up, they sure don't want to collapse it and help create the semantic web, except privately behind the scenes, in creepy surveillance capitalist and other centralizing projects.
Is it? Was Tim Berners-Lee influences by Project Xanadu? Was he aware at all?
In essence, Ted Nelson (and Vannevar Bush) are referenced in the "History" section, and also for coining the term "Hypertext", but not from the "Technical" [2] and "Standards" [3] sections.
[1]: http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html
Earlier discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15269827
A famous (and infamous) article, "The Curse of Xanadu", on "the longest-running vaporware project in the history of computing, a 30-year saga of rabid prototyping and heart-slashing despair" (now closer to 50 years and counting): https://www.wired.com/1995/06/xanadu/
I don't think I'd actually clicked through and seen this demo before, though, which adds some interesting new objections to it on my end -- I find the user experience here ugly and cryptic. I'm sure a much nicer one with these ideas could be made, but it seems oddly telling that Xanadu's proponents think this -- and the Xanadu web site in general -- are great ways to sell the ideas.
If the system is working correctly, you should always be able to follow transcluded quotations back to their original primary source - that is one of the most fundamental design principles. Conversely, the rightsholder of a document should be able to see where their work is being quoted.
Reading old papers from Nelson, Engelbart, or Bush is a lot of fun, though it can sometimes take a little work to get into a pre-internet headspace. I don't read very many authors these days who are attempting to rethink fundamental computer interface concepts like that, though there are a few.
Many are happy with the status quo, and see it as overly complex
Some see it as evil, like communism.
Some see it as hope for the future. Hope that should have arrived half a century ago, at least.
But I also believe there will be always a space for current webapps, treating links as RPCs against external systems.
EDIT: For anyone interested here is Ted Nelson explaining the system in 2008 on an example system implementation of his original idea: