Xanadu was a pre-web attempt to create all that the web is and more. It failed because it was too ambitious and too complex technically. For example, links w

Xanadu was a pre-web attempt to create all that the web is and more. It failed because it was too ambitious and too complex technically. For example, links were two way, so from a document you could find all the documents that pointed to it. It supported micro-payments. I think it was going to support itself by skimming from the payments. It was pre-internet, so they had to invent a communications infrastructure on top of POTS. I visited Xanadu for an afternoon in the mid 80's. The programmers were talented and very dedicated, but it was obvious that they were having difficulty converging on something that was simple and worked. Contrast this with the Web which had two simple protocols, HTML and HTTP, which could be implemented easily and extended by the multitudes.