|
Project Xanadu was founded by Ted Nelson in 1960 as the original hypertext project. It was referred to by Wired Magazine as "longest-running vaporware story in the history of the computer industry": the first attempt at implementation began in 1960, but it wasn't until 1998 that (incomplete) software was released. In the meantime, the World Wide Web came into being, fulfilling many of the project's underlying visions. Ted Nelson Theodor Holm Nelson (born circa 1939) invented the term hypertext in 1963 and published it in 1965, and is a pioneer of information technology. ...
1960 was a leap year starting on Friday (link will take you to calendar). ...
In computing, hypertext is a user interface paradigm for displaying documents which, according to an early definition (Nelson 1970), branch or perform on request. ...
Wired magazine is a full-color monthly magazine and on-line periodical published in San Francisco, California since March 1993. ...
Vaporware (also spelled vapourware) is software or hardware which is announced by a developer well in advance of release, but which then fails to emerge, either with or without a protracted development cycle. ...
Graphic representation of the World Wide Web around Wikipedia The World Wide Web (WWW, W3, or simply the Web) is an information space in which the items of interest, referred to as resources, are identified by global identifiers called Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs). ...
History
During his first year as a graduate student at Harvard, Nelson began implementing the system which contained the basic outline of what would become Project Xanadu: a word processor capable of storing multiple versions, and displaying the differences between these versions. Though he did not complete this implementation, a mock up of the system proved sufficient to inspire interest in others. Harvard, see Harvard (disambiguation) Harvard University is a private university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA and a member of the Ivy League. ...
On top of this basic idea, Nelson wished to facilitate "nonsequential writing", where the user could choose their own path through an electronic document. He built upon this idea in a paper to the ACM in 1965, calling the new idea "zippered lists". These zippered lists would allow compound documents to be formed from pieces of other documents, an idea he would later refer to as transclusion. In 1967, while working for Harcourt, Brace he named his idea Xanadu, in honour of the poem Kubla Khan by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The Association for Computing Machinery, or ACM, was founded in 1947 as the worlds first scientific and educational computing society. ...
In computer science, some hypertext systems, including Ted Nelsons Xanadu Project, have the capability for documents to include sections of other documents by reference, called transclusion. ...
Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich is a U.S. publishing firm, and one of the worlds largest publishers of textbooks. ...
Xanadu or Shangdu (Chinese: 上都; pinyin: ) was the summer capital of Kublai Khans Mongol Empire, which covered much of Asia. ...
Kubla Khan is a poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge which takes its title from the Mongol/Chinese emperor Kublai Khan, of the Yuan dynasty. ...
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, English poet, 1795 Samuel Taylor Coleridge (October 21, 1772 – July 25, 1834) was an English poet, critic, and philosopher who was, along with his friend William Wordsworth, one of the founders of the Romantic Movement in England and as one of the Lake Poets. ...
Ted Nelson published his visionary ideas in his 1974 book Computer Lib/Dream Machines and the 1981 Literary Machines. Computer Lib/Dream Machines is written in a non-sequential fashion: it is a compilation of Nelson's random thoughts about computing, among other topics. The books are printed back to back, to be flipped between. Computer Lib contains Nelson's thoughts on topics which angered him, Dream Machines discusses his hopes for the potential of computers to assist the arts. 1974 (MCMLXXIV) is a common year starting on Tuesday (click on link for calendar). ...
1981 (MCMLXXXI) is a common year starting on Thursday of the Gregorian calendar. ...
Literary Machines is a book by Ted Nelson, published in 1982, describing his Project Xanadu. ...
In 1972, Cal Daniels completed the first demo version of the Xanadu software on a computer Nelson had rented for the purpose, though Nelson soon ran out of money. In 1974, with the advent of computer networking, Nelson revised his thoughts about Xanadu into a centralised source of information which he dubbed a "docuverse".
In the summer of 1979, Nelson led the latest group of his followers, Roger Gregory, Mark Miller and Stuart Greene, to Swarthmore. In a house rented by Gregory, they hashed out their ideas for Xanadu; but at the end of the summer the group went their separate ways. Miller and Gregory created an addressing system based on transfinite numbers which they called tumblers, which allowed any part of a file to be referenced. See: Swarthmoor Hall, historic Quaker site in Cumbria, England Swarthmore College, Liberal arts college in Pennsylvania Swarthmore, Pennsylvania This is a disambiguation page — a navigational aid which lists other pages that might otherwise share the same title. ...
Transfinite numbers, also known as infinite numbers, are numbers that are not finite. ...
Tumblers were proposed by Ted Nelson in Literary Machines as a means to address every bit ever written, or a particular span of bits in any text ever written. ...
The group continued their work, almost to the point of bankruptcy. In 1983, however, Nelson met John Walker, founder of Autodesk, at a conference for the people mentioned in Steven Levy's Hackers, and the group started working on Xanadu with Autodesk's financial backing. Autodesk, Inc. ...
Steven Levy is an American journalist who has written several books on computers, technology, cryptography, the Internet, cyber security and privacy. ...
Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution (ISBN 0385191952) is a book by Steven Levy about the hacker culture. ...
While at Autodesk, the group, lead by Gregory, completed a version of the software, written in the C programming language, though the software didn't work as well as they wanted. However, this version of Xanadu was successfully demonstrated at the Hacker's Conference and generated considerable interest. Then a newer group of programmers, hired from Xerox PARC, used the problems with this software as justification to rewrite the software in Smalltalk. This effectively split the group into two factions, and the decision to rewrite put a deadline imposed by Autodesk out of the team's reach. In August 1992, Autodesk divested the Xanadu group, which became the Xanadu Operating Company, which struggled due to internal conflicts and lack of investment. The C Programming Language, Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie, the original edition that served for many years as an informal specification of the language The C programming language is a standardized imperative computer programming language developed in the early 1970s by Dennis Ritchie for use on the Unix operating system. ...
Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) was a flagship research division of the Xerox Corporation, based in Palo Alto, California, USA, which essentially created the modern personal computer paper paradigm. ...
Smalltalk is an object-oriented, dynamically typed, reflective, programming language designed at Xerox PARC by Alan Kay, Dan Ingalls, Ted Kaehler, Adele Goldberg, and others during the 1970s, influenced by Sketchpad and Simula. ...
Charles S. Smith, the founder of a company called Memex (the name of the hypertext system designed by Vannevar Bush), hired many of the Xanadu programmers and licensed the Xanadu technology, though Memex soon faced financial difficulties, and the then-unpaid programmers left, taking the computers with them. (The programmers were eventually paid.) At around this time, Tim Berners-Lee was developing the World Wide Web. The memex was a theoretical analog computer described by the scientist and engineer Vannevar Bush in the 1945 The Atlantic Monthly article As We May Think. The word was a portmanteau of memory extender. Bush described the device as electronically linked to a library and able to display books and...
Vannevar Bush (March 11, 1890 – June 30, 1974) was an American engineer and science administrator, known for his political role in the development of the atomic bomb, and idea of the memex—seen as a pioneering concept for the World Wide Web. ...
Sir Tim Berners-Lee Sir Tim (Timothy John) Berners-Lee, KBE (TimBL or TBL) (b. ...
Graphic representation of the World Wide Web around Wikipedia The World Wide Web (WWW, W3, or simply the Web) is an information space in which the items of interest, referred to as resources, are identified by global identifiers called Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs). ...
In 1998, Nelson released the source code to Xanadu as Project Udanax, in the hope that the techniques and algorithms used could help to overturn some software patents. Software patents and patents on computer-implemented inventions (CII) are a class of patents and one of many legal aspects of computing. ...
The influence of Xanadu Many of Project Xanadu's proposed features have found their way into other hypertext systems, including the World Wide Web and WikiWiki systems. Though lacking in the scope proposed by Nelson, transclusion is practised on the web. HTML's IFRAME element allows full web pages to be included within other pages, RSS aggregators provide compound web pages which consist of items from several locations, and the utopic/dystopic Googlezon’s autogenerated stories is an idea on how transclusion will become more and more widespread. In computing, hypertext is a user interface paradigm for displaying documents which, according to an early definition (Nelson 1970), branch or perform on request. ...
Graphic representation of the World Wide Web around Wikipedia The World Wide Web (WWW, W3, or simply the Web) is an information space in which the items of interest, referred to as resources, are identified by global identifiers called Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs). ...
Wikibooks has more about this subject: Wiki Science A wiki is a web application that allows users to add content, as on an Internet forum, but also allows anyone to edit the content. ...
In computing, HyperText Markup Language (HTML) is a markup language designed for the creation of web pages and other information viewable in a browser. ...
It has been suggested that RDF Site Summary be merged into this article or section. ...
Utopian, in its most common and general positive meaning, refers to the human efforts to create a better, or perhaps perfect society. ...
This article is about the philosophical concept. ...
Though micropayments have been slow to take off, PayPal is slowly gaining acceptance on the web. Micropayments are means for transferring money, in situations where collecting money with the usual payment systems is impractical, or very expensive, in terms of the amount of money being collected. ...
PayPal is an Internet business which allows the transfer of money between email users and merchants, avoiding traditional paper methods such as checks/cheques and money orders. ...
The web versus Xanadu There are several reasons why the World Wide Web gained the popularity it now enjoys, while Project Xanadu remains a relatively obscure piece of computing history. Graphic representation of the World Wide Web around Wikipedia The World Wide Web (WWW, W3, or simply the Web) is an information space in which the items of interest, referred to as resources, are identified by global identifiers called Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs). ...
- Complexity vs. Simplicity
- Project Xanadu contains many complex ideas. Transclusion in Xanadu allows documents to contain any part of any other document, whereas the web merely allows linking to complete documents. The web is compatible with existing file system ideas, while Xanadu would possibly require the use of complicated databases, which may be difficult to maintain.
- Copyright
- Xanadu's model of transclusion might have proven unpopular with authors. Despite the facilities for authors of documents to be paid when part of their work was transcluded in another's document, there seems to be no guarantee that the authors of these documents would receive proper credit in the transcluding work. Many authors object to their work being used as the basis of the sort of derivative works which transclusion would allow, but feel comfortable with having their complete work distributed on the web.
- Availability
- Perhaps the greatest factor is that, quite simply, the web was there, and it worked, while Project Xanadu is still incomplete.
In computing, a file system is a method for storing and organizing computer files and the data they contain to make it easy to find and access them. ...
In computer science, some hypertext systems, including Ted Nelsons Xanadu Project, have the capability for documents to include sections of other documents by reference, called transclusion. ...
Project Xanadu related projects under development Free software, as defined by the Free Software Foundation, is software which can be used, copied, studied, modified and redistributed without restriction. ...
Jason Rohrer is the author of konspire2b, a pseudononymous channel-based file-distribution system token word, a Xanadu-style text editing system tangle, a proxy server which tries to find relationships between websites a user visits External links Home page Categories: People stubs ...
References
External links |
Feeds |
Contact