Project Xanadu
Encyclopedia
Project Xanadu was the first hypertext
project, founded in 1960 by Ted Nelson
. Administrators of Project Xanadu have declared it an improvement over the World Wide Web, with mission statement: "Today's popular software simulates paper. The World Wide Web (another imitation of paper) trivialises our original hypertext model with one-way ever-breaking links and no management of version or contents." Wired
magazine called it the "longest-running vaporware
story in the history of the computer industry". The first attempt at implementation began in 1960, but it was not until 1998 that an implementation was released, and this was incomplete.
On top of this basic idea, Nelson wanted to facilitate nonsequential writing, in which the reader could choose his or her 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, a concept named transclusion
. In 1967, while working for Harcourt, Brace
, he named his project Xanadu
, in honour of the poem "Kubla Khan
" by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
.
Ted Nelson published his 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 thoughts about computing, among other topics, in no particular order. It contains two books, printed back to back, to be flipped between. Computer Lib contains Nelson's thoughts on topics which angered him, while Dream Machines discusses his hopes for the potential of computers to assist the arts.
In 1972, Cal Daniels completed the first demonstration 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 refined his thoughts about Xanadu into a centralised source of information, calling it a "docuverse
".
In the summer of 1979, Nelson led the latest group of his followers, Roger Gregory
, Mark S. Miller
and Stuart Greene, to Swarthmore, Pennsylvania
. In a house rented by Greene, 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 number
s which they called tumblers, which allowed any part of a file to be referenced.
The group continued their work, almost to the point of bankruptcy. In 1983, however, Nelson met John Walker, founder of Autodesk
, at The Hackers Conference
a conference originally for the people mentioned in Steven Levy
's Hackers
, and the group started working on Xanadu with Autodesk's financial backing.
According to economist Robin Hanson
, in 1990 the first known corporate prediction market
was used at Xanadu. Employees and consultants used it for example to bet on the cold fusion
controversy at the time.
While at Autodesk, the group, led by Gregory, completed a version of the software, written in the C programming language
, though the software did not work the way they wanted. However, this version of Xanadu was successfully demonstrated at The Hackers 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.
Charles S. Smith, the founder of a company called Memex (named after a hypertext system
proposed 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
. When the Web began to see large growth that Xanadu did not, Nelson's team grew defensive in the supposed rivalry that was emerging, but that they were losing. The 1995 Wired Magazine article "The Curse of Xanadu," provoked a harsh rebuttal from Nelson, but contention largely faded as the Web dominated Xanadu.
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 patent
s.
In 2007, Project Xanadu released XanaduSpace 1.0.
Hypertext
Hypertext is text displayed on a computer or other electronic device with references to other text that the reader can immediately access, usually by a mouse click or keypress sequence. Apart from running text, hypertext may contain tables, images and other presentational devices. Hypertext is the...
project, founded in 1960 by Ted Nelson
Ted Nelson
Theodor Holm Nelson is an American sociologist, philosopher, and pioneer of information technology. He coined the terms "hypertext" and "hypermedia" in 1963 and published it in 1965...
. Administrators of Project Xanadu have declared it an improvement over the World Wide Web, with mission statement: "Today's popular software simulates paper. The World Wide Web (another imitation of paper) trivialises our original hypertext model with one-way ever-breaking links and no management of version or contents." Wired
Wired (magazine)
Wired is a full-color monthly American magazine and on-line periodical, published since January 1993, that reports on how new and developing technology affects culture, the economy, and politics...
magazine called it the "longest-running vaporware
Vaporware
Vaporware is a term in the computer industry that describes a product, typically computer hardware or software, that is announced to the general public but is never actually released nor officially canceled. Vaporware is also a term sometimes used to describe events that are announced or predicted,...
story in the history of the computer industry". The first attempt at implementation began in 1960, but it was not until 1998 that an implementation was released, and this was incomplete.
History
During his first year as a graduate student at Harvard, Ted 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 mockup of the system proved sufficient to inspire interest in others.On top of this basic idea, Nelson wanted to facilitate nonsequential writing, in which the reader could choose his or her own path through an electronic document. He built upon this idea in a paper to the ACM
Association for Computing Machinery
The Association for Computing Machinery is a learned society for computing. It was founded in 1947 as the world's first scientific and educational computing society. Its membership is more than 92,000 as of 2009...
in 1965, calling the new idea "zippered lists". These zippered lists would allow compound documents to be formed from pieces of other documents, a concept named transclusion
Transclusion
In computer science, transclusion is the inclusion of a document or part of a document into another document by reference.For example, an article about a country might include a chart or a paragraph describing that country's agricultural exports from a different article about agriculture...
. In 1967, while working for Harcourt, Brace
Harcourt Trade Publishers
Harcourt was a United States publishing firm with a long history of publishing fiction and nonfiction for children and adults. The company was based in San Diego, California, with an Editorial / Sales / Marketing / Rights offices in New York City and Orlando, Florida.In 2007, the U.S...
, he named his project Xanadu
Xanadu
-Description of Xanadu by Toghon Temur :The lament of Toghon Temur Khan , concerning the loss of Daidu and Heibun Shanduu in 1368, is recorded in many Mongolian historical chronicles...
, in honour of the poem "Kubla Khan
Kubla Khan
Kubla Khan is a poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, completed in 1797 and published in Christabel, Kubla Khan, and the Pains of Sleep in 1816...
" by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Samuel Taylor Coleridge was an English poet, Romantic, literary critic and philosopher who, with his friend William Wordsworth, was a founder of the Romantic Movement in England and a member of the Lake Poets. He is probably best known for his poems The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla...
.
Ted Nelson published his ideas in his 1974 book Computer Lib/Dream Machines and the 1981 Literary Machines
Literary Machines
Literary Machines is a book first published in 1980 by Ted Nelson, and republished 9 times by 1993. It offers an extensive overview of Nelson's term "hypertext" as well as Nelson's Project Xanadu...
.
Computer Lib/Dream Machines is written in a non-sequential fashion: it is a compilation of Nelson's thoughts about computing, among other topics, in no particular order. It contains two books, printed back to back, to be flipped between. Computer Lib contains Nelson's thoughts on topics which angered him, while Dream Machines discusses his hopes for the potential of computers to assist the arts.
In 1972, Cal Daniels completed the first demonstration 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 refined his thoughts about Xanadu into a centralised source of information, calling it a "docuverse
Docuverse
Docuverse is a global distributed electronic library of interconnected documents, in other words a global metadocument. The term was coined by Ted Nelson in 1974, as a concept related to the Project Xanadu, and the World Wide Web later nominally fulfilled a subset of the aspects of Nelson's...
".
In the summer of 1979, Nelson led the latest group of his followers, Roger Gregory
Roger Gregory (programmer)
Roger Everett Gregory is a US computer programmer, technologist and scientist. Gregory's work in project Xanadu made him one of earliest pioneers of hypertext technology. Gregory is also co-designer of a rotary rocket engine design based on the posthumous patents of Robert Goddard Roger Everett...
, Mark S. Miller
Mark S. Miller
Mark S. Miller is an American computer scientist. He is known for his work as one of the participants in the 1979 hypertext project known as Project Xanadu; for inventing Miller Columns; as the co-creator of the Agoric Paradigm of market-based distributed secure computing; and the open-source...
and Stuart Greene, to Swarthmore, Pennsylvania
Swarthmore, Pennsylvania
Swarthmore is a borough in Delaware County, Pennsylvania, United States. Swarthmore was originally named Westdale in honor of noted painter Benjamin West, who was one of the early residents of the town. The name was changed to Swarthmore after the establishment of Swarthmore College...
. In a house rented by Greene, 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 number
Transfinite number
Transfinite numbers are numbers that are "infinite" in the sense that they are larger than all finite numbers, yet not necessarily absolutely infinite. The term transfinite was coined by Georg Cantor, who wished to avoid some of the implications of the word infinite in connection with these...
s which they called tumblers, which allowed any part of a file to be referenced.
The group continued their work, almost to the point of bankruptcy. In 1983, however, Nelson met John Walker, founder of Autodesk
Autodesk
Autodesk, Inc. is an American multinational corporation that focuses on 3D design software for use in the architecture, engineering, construction, manufacturing, media and entertainment industries. The company was founded in 1982 by John Walker, a coauthor of the first versions of the company's...
, at The Hackers Conference
The Hackers Conference
The Hackers Conference is an annual invitation-only gathering of designers, engineers and programmers to discuss the latest developments and innovations in the computer industry....
a conference originally for the people mentioned in Steven Levy
Steven Levy
Steven Levy is an American journalist who has written several books on computers, technology, cryptography, the Internet, cybersecurity, and privacy.-Career:...
's Hackers
Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution
Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution is a book by Steven Levy about hacker culture. It was published in 1984 in Garden City, New York by Anchor Press/Doubleday...
, and the group started working on Xanadu with Autodesk's financial backing.
According to economist Robin Hanson
Robin Hanson
Robin D. Hanson is an associate professor of economics at George Mason University and a research associate at the Future of Humanity Institute of Oxford University. He is known as an expert on idea futures, markets and was involved in the creation of the Foresight Exchange and DARPA's FutureMAP...
, in 1990 the first known corporate prediction market
Prediction market
Prediction markets are speculative markets created for the purpose of making predictions...
was used at Xanadu. Employees and consultants used it for example to bet on the cold fusion
Cold fusion
Cold fusion, also called low-energy nuclear reaction , refers to the hypothesis that nuclear fusion might explain the results of a group of experiments conducted at ordinary temperatures . Both the experimental results and the hypothesis are disputed...
controversy at the time.
While at Autodesk, the group, led by Gregory, completed a version of the software, written in the C programming language
C (programming language)
C is a general-purpose computer programming language developed between 1969 and 1973 by Dennis Ritchie at the Bell Telephone Laboratories for use with the Unix operating system....
, though the software did not work the way they wanted. However, this version of Xanadu was successfully demonstrated at The Hackers Conference
The Hackers Conference
The Hackers Conference is an annual invitation-only gathering of designers, engineers and programmers to discuss the latest developments and innovations in the computer industry....
and generated considerable interest. Then a newer group of programmers, hired from Xerox PARC
Xerox PARC
PARC , formerly Xerox PARC, is a research and co-development company in Palo Alto, California, with a distinguished reputation for its contributions to information technology and hardware systems....
, used the problems with this software as justification to rewrite
Rewrite (programming)
A rewrite in computer programming is the act or result of re-implementing a large portion of existing functionality without re-use of its source code. When the rewrite is not using existing code at all, it is common to speak of a rewrite from scratch...
the software in Smalltalk
Smalltalk
Smalltalk is an object-oriented, dynamically typed, reflective programming language. Smalltalk was created as the language to underpin the "new world" of computing exemplified by "human–computer symbiosis." It was designed and created in part for educational use, more so for constructionist...
. 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.
Charles S. Smith, the founder of a company called Memex (named after a hypertext system
Memex
The memex is the name given by Vannevar Bush to the hypothetical proto-hypertext system he described in his 1945 The Atlantic Monthly article As We May Think...
proposed by Vannevar Bush
Vannevar Bush
Vannevar Bush was an American engineer and science administrator known for his work on analog computing, his political role in the development of the atomic bomb as a primary organizer of the Manhattan Project, the founding of Raytheon, and the idea of the memex, an adjustable microfilm viewer...
), 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
Tim Berners-Lee
Sir Timothy John "Tim" Berners-Lee, , also known as "TimBL", is a British computer scientist, MIT professor and the inventor of the World Wide Web...
was developing the World Wide Web
World Wide Web
The World Wide Web is a system of interlinked hypertext documents accessed via the Internet...
. When the Web began to see large growth that Xanadu did not, Nelson's team grew defensive in the supposed rivalry that was emerging, but that they were losing. The 1995 Wired Magazine article "The Curse of Xanadu," provoked a harsh rebuttal from Nelson, but contention largely faded as the Web dominated Xanadu.
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 patent
Software patent
Software patent does not have a universally accepted definition. One definition suggested by the Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure is that a software patent is a "patent on any performance of a computer realised by means of a computer program".In 2005, the European Patent Office...
s.
In 2007, Project Xanadu released XanaduSpace 1.0.
Original 17 rules
- Every Xanadu server is uniquely and securely identified.
- Every Xanadu server can be operated independently or in a network.
- Every user is uniquely and securely identified.
- Every user can search, retrieve, create and store documents.
- Every document can consist of any number of parts each of which may be of any data type.
- Every document can contain links of any type including virtual copies ("transclusions") to any other document in the system accessible to its owner.
- Links are visible and can be followed from all endpoints.
- Permission to link to a document is explicitly granted by the act of publication.
- Every document can contain a royalty mechanism at any desired degree of granularity to ensure payment on any portion accessed, including virtual copies ("transclusions"TransclusionIn computer science, transclusion is the inclusion of a document or part of a document into another document by reference.For example, an article about a country might include a chart or a paragraph describing that country's agricultural exports from a different article about agriculture...
) of all or part of the document. - Every document is uniquely and securely identified.
- Every document can have secure access controls.
- Every document can be rapidly searched, stored and retrieved without user knowledge of where it is physically stored.
- Every document is automatically moved to physical storage appropriate to its frequency of access from any given location.
- Every document is automatically stored redundantly to maintain availability even in case of a disaster.
- Every Xanadu service provider can charge their users at any rate they choose for the storage, retrieval and publishing of documents.
- Every transaction is secure and auditable only by the parties to that transaction.
- The Xanadu client-server communication protocol is an openly published standard. Third-party software development and integration is encouraged.
See also
- Enfilade (Xanadu)Enfilade (Xanadu)Enfilades are a class of tree data structures used in Project Xanadu designs of the 1970s and 1980s. Enfilades allow quick editing, versioning, retrieval and inter-comparison operations in a large, cross-linked hypertext database...
- HypertextHypertextHypertext is text displayed on a computer or other electronic device with references to other text that the reader can immediately access, usually by a mouse click or keypress sequence. Apart from running text, hypertext may contain tables, images and other presentational devices. Hypertext is the...
- HypermediaHypermediaHypermedia is a computer-based information retrieval system that enables a user to gain or provide access to texts, audio and video recordings, photographs and computer graphics related to a particular subject.Hypermedia is a term created by Ted Nelson....
- MemexMemexThe memex is the name given by Vannevar Bush to the hypothetical proto-hypertext system he described in his 1945 The Atlantic Monthly article As We May Think...
- ENQUIREENQUIREENQUIRE was an early software project written in 1980 by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN, which was the predecessor to the World Wide Web in 1989.It was a simple hypertext program that had some of the same ideas as the Web and the Semantic Web but was different in several important ways.According to...
- InterpediaInterpediaInterpedia was the name given to the first proposals for an Internet encyclopedia which would allow anyone to contribute by writing articles and submitting them to the central catalog of all Interpedia pages....
- American Information ExchangeAmerican Information ExchangeThe American Information Exchange was a platform for the buying and selling of information, goods and services as well as the exchange of information, ideas, and certain kinds of intellectual work product, created by economist and futurist Phil Salin in the 1980s.Starting in 1984, Salin worked to...
External links
- Xanadu Australia – an active site
- The open-source release of the Xanadu codebase
- Links to Xanadu projects
- The Xanadu Cyberarcheology Project
- Web replacement projects
- "Xanadu Products Due Next Year," by Jeff Merron. BIX online news report from the West Coast Computer Faire, 1988