5 ms·

I don't know the autobiography, but everything I have read by Nelson tells me he had very specific implementation ideas. With Xanadu he had very clear ideas, f

I don't know the autobiography, but everything I have read by Nelson tells me he had very specific implementation ideas. With Xanadu he had very clear ideas, for example, about documents that link to each other (even down to the paragraph/word/character level) and are able to preserve their integrity even in the face of edits, and his collaborators were able to come up with quite brilliant technical solutions. Nelson had a lot of working prototypes made up throughout the years. One crucial problem was that a Xanadu-style system was a closed system; in a distributed world, the same implementation would have had to be run by every single server. It was diametrically opposite in philosophy to what became the World Wide Web, with its "anything goes" URL scheme, and it was a very clear case of "worse is better" winning over a carefully designed, walled-garden ivory-tower kind of solution. Of course, Xanadu was completely prescient about link integrity. There was a rather sad post on HN recently about an late-1990s book which had lots of URLs to resources, none of which worked.

scottLobster 9y ago
Did he though? It's been many decades with little if anything to show for it, and Nelson admits to this day he's not a programmer. So it sounds like his ideas are just drawings and equations on paper. That's design, not implementation. Apparently there's some old demo version, but... http://xanadu.com/xuspViewer.html http://xanadu.com/xuspViewer.html "Unfortunately this made it a very complicated package, eventually too tangled to improve further, and Rob had to get on to other things. " So one volunteer (Rob) who actually made a working demo some years ago wrote spaghetti code that couldn't scale. That's as close as they can get to working software in decades? Granted the system they propose is difficult to grasp and likely math-heavy, but I don't see it as multiple-decades difficult given the progress computing has made in that time. The more I read about Nelson and Xanadu, the more it seems like the people backing it have no desire to interact with reality. It's as if they expect their grand ideas, simply by virtue of being grand, will naturally create a viable product on their own somehow, and the "low work" of creating a viable product with a market is somehow beneath them.
- setr 9y ago
  It might've been the above wired article, but some discussion of his work I vaguely remember was Nelson being bought into by I think autodesk, and Nelson basically managed the project poorly; the team would make headway in some direction over a year, then decide to do a fundamental redesign. Repeatedly. So a fully working product was never built, though some interesting components were
- lobster_johnson 9y ago
  I don't mean that they ever had a workable implementation. I mean that it wasn't just cloud talk. They did multiple implementations, of Xanadu itself and other components, some of which was open-sourced. So it's a lot more than just visionary talk, and a little more than just design.

scottLobster 9y ago

Did he though? It's been many decades with little if anything to show for it, and Nelson admits to this day he's not a programmer. So it sounds like his ideas are just drawings and equations on paper. That's design, not implementation. Apparently there's some old demo version, but... http://xanadu.com/xuspViewer.html http://xanadu.com/xuspViewer.html "Unfortunately this made it a very complicated package, eventually too tangled to improve further, and Rob had to get on to other things. " So one volunteer (Rob) who actually made a working demo some years ago wrote spaghetti code that couldn't scale. That's as close as they can get to working software in decades? Granted the system they propose is difficult to grasp and likely math-heavy, but I don't see it as multiple-decades difficult given the progress computing has made in that time. The more I read about Nelson and Xanadu, the more it seems like the people backing it have no desire to interact with reality. It's as if they expect their grand ideas, simply by virtue of being grand, will naturally create a viable product on their own somehow, and the "low work" of creating a viable product with a market is somehow beneath them.

setr 9y ago
It might've been the above wired article, but some discussion of his work I vaguely remember was Nelson being bought into by I think autodesk, and Nelson basically managed the project poorly; the team would make headway in some direction over a year, then decide to do a fundamental redesign. Repeatedly. So a fully working product was never built, though some interesting components were
lobster_johnson 9y ago
I don't mean that they ever had a workable implementation. I mean that it wasn't just cloud talk. They did multiple implementations, of Xanadu itself and other components, some of which was open-sourced. So it's a lot more than just visionary talk, and a little more than just design.