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Comment by EarlKing | Hacker News Reader

Maybe it's just me, but it feels like Xanadu was always vaporware for a very important reason: It never had a specification concrete enough to implement because its chief architect always came off like a schizophrenic. I can't be alone in thinking that. No one who's read any of the numerous papers and books surrounding this fiasco can walk away thinking it's author is sane. There's just something about that "stream of consciousness" style of all Ted Nelson's papers that point to there being something fundamentally wrong with him.

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.

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There's a fine line between schizophrenia and creative genius and Nelson walks that line enormously all things considered. Project Xanadu aside Computer Lib and his work on HyperText systems in the 1960's are still incredibly ahead their time. Nelson is a pioneer on the same level as McCarthy, Kay, or Minsky but he didn't come up the way that they did. He's firstly a filmmaker; I think a lot of people miss this.

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.

Everyone does the color-rays thing first, because that's the easy part. At the heart of his vision are several non-trivial, unsolved problems. Most of these are still non-trivial & unsolved. Instead of clearly identifying & expanding upon these problems, one-by-one, & posting a bounty, he blames his programmers. The man does not like programmers.

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.

In all fairness, there's a reason why Ted had a grudge against programmers, and he spelled it out in Computer Lib/Dream Machines. When he grew up, programmers were still generally the High Priests of the Machine, dressed in their business suits and working for the Man.

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.

They're still high priests of the machine, but now dressed in free t-shirts & warby parkers. I also dislike programmers, but they are the least of his problems.

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.

> 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 never had a specification concrete enough to implement because its chief architect always came off like a schizophrenic"

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.

Ted wrote a book ("Computer Lib/Dream Machines", 1974). He still sells it! Ted has known how computers work, in high detail, for longer than most of us have been alive.

Yes! That book was an important contribution in its day. I wrote an appreciation of it here a few years ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22176769

Hm, I have not read that book yet, but from what I gathered, it confirmed my view - that he has a generalist understanding of computers(and the sociological impact), but lack the details and don't know how to programm himself.

As someone who has read that book, & owns it, I can attest to the fact that Ted knows more about how computers work than most people who call themselves professional programmers (I know, I know, low bar..., but even so).

If this were a forum, instead of a plantation, I could post selections from it, and you could see for yourself.

> its chief architect always came off like a schizophrenic

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?

Note the classic troll: Making idiotic statements without backing, and constantly teasing that they're going to back them while making further idiotic statements along the way. This troll never backed anything they said, of course, and the moderators here will never be intelligent enough to sanction this behavior.

Ted also got into fights with almost everybody he ever worked with on Xanadu

Did he? This is a part of the story I've never heard. Got any stories / links?

There is definitely some truth to this, but he has never got into any fights with me over the last 40 years that I've been working with him.

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