No, Yes, and Yes! Most importantly, Xanadu and Mimix are very different products. Nelson envisioned Xanadu as a publishing and copyright enforcement system. Mi

No, Yes, and Yes! Most importantly, Xanadu and Mimix are very different products. Nelson envisioned Xanadu as a publishing and copyright enforcement system. Mimix is aimed at the opposite group of users: those who create and consume textual content. Mimix is about more than document versioning. In Mimix, there are no documents. There are only atoms and streams. A stream is a sequence of atoms which can be presented in its original order (chronologically, as it is created) or remixed or extracted without limitation. A "document" that you read in the wild and later write about is, in Mimix, a stream of unalterable atoms, recorded in a write-only database. This is vastly different from today's document and paper metaphor, which is really an artifact of the printing press that can be dispensed with. Proper citation is half the goal of Mimix's implementation of what we call canonical data -- making sure that the reader knows what came from where. But the other half lies in assisting the writer in finding and organizing these sources in the first place. Today, research and writing are separate tools done in different programs. A great economy would be realized if these functions were intelligently combined. And YES! to a better method of publishing (I would say "representing") text. Everything that happens during a Mimix session is recorded in MSL, the Mimix Stream Recording language. Instead of files of dumb data that get interpreted by different programs in different ways, MSL upgrades the data to include instructions about what's going on -- as it's being written. This allows the next user to rewind and fast-forward (as you would with a video) but also to extract and remix (which are not possible with video.) Thanks for giving me a jumping-off point for discussion! :-)