21 ms·

Project Xanadu

132 points by alokrai 6y ago

mimixco 6y ago
Getting to Xanadu: https://mimix.io/en/blog/xanadu https://mimix.io/en/blog/xanadu
- kristopolous 6y ago
  There's no GitHub because Ted doesn't believe in open source. He's not on board with open systems at all We don't talk anymore because of that disagreement. I tried to convince him to blow the thing open and tried to explain how that's how projects get accelerated. Nope, not happening.
  - dwohnitmok 6y ago
    I mean open systems would be fundamentally in tension with the whole idea of paid, proprietary transclusion that's one of the central pillars of Xanadu right?
    - anotheryou 6y ago
      I'd say to make transclusions with the micro transactions work it has to be an open standard. It needs browser support and people willing to use it encoding their work.
      - dwohnitmok 6y ago
        Ah sorry I don't mean the mechanism itself, I was referring to the content. Although even in the case of the standard, leaving aside whether this would make Xanadu feasible or not, I'm not sure given Xanadu's history whether it was ever conceived of being "open" in the same way, say HTML is. There are plenty of standards that are effectively closed and require payment to access and read (see e.g. ISO standards as well as, in the U.S. the state of Georgia very nearly getting away with putting legally-binding annotations behind a paywall: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/04/supreme-court-rules-georgia-cant-put-the-law-behind-a-paywall/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/04/supreme-court-ru...). I think Xanadu's philosophy would've lent it to a similar approach, independent of what this would mean for its survival.
        tannhaeuser 6y ago
        That you've got to pay for a copy of many (but not all [1]) ISO standards doesn't make them closed. Lack of funding for standardization work and the expectation that everything must be had at no cost is what gets you monopolies and dominating players, such as with so-called web standards. Nothing new really; citing from a post by Paul Prescod from 1997 in the context of subsetting XML from SGML [2]: > Are you happy with the process for developing and improving HTML? Do you feel that the results are of high quality? Do you think that you've had sufficient input? [...] > In order to influence ISO standards you need only be recognized as an expert in your country. Unless your country is an oligarchy or dictatorship, this will cost you very little or nothing at all [...] [1]: https://standards.iso.org/ittf/PubliclyAvailableStandards/index.html https://standards.iso.org/ittf/PubliclyAvailableStandards/in... (beware comically broken page on mobile) [2]: http://lists.xml.org/archives/xml-dev/199710/msg00189.html http://lists.xml.org/archives/xml-dev/199710/msg00189.html
        DonHopkins 6y ago
        Here's another comment I wrote in the HN discussion from a couple years ago about "Ted Nelson on What Modern Programmers Can Learn from the Past [video] (ieee.org)", in which James Clark talked about his role in the transition from SGML to XML, and the value of standards being sufficiently simple to have multiple interoperable implementations: IEEE Article and video about "Ted Nelson on What Modern Programmers Can Learn from the Past": https://spectrum.ieee.org/video/geek-life/profiles/ted-nelson-on-what-modern-programmers-can-learn-from-the-past https://spectrum.ieee.org/video/geek-life/profiles/ted-nelso... HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16222520 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16222520 My comment and quotes from the DDJ interview of James Clark, "The Triumph of Simplicity": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16227249 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16227249 In the ideal world we would all be using s-expressions and Lisp, but now XML and JSON fill the need of language-independent data formats. >Not trying to defend XSLT (which I find to be a mixed bag), but you're aware that it's precursor was DSSSL (Scheme), with pretty much a one-to-one correspondence of language constructs and symbol names, aren't you? The mighty programmer James Clark wrote the de-facto reference SGML parser and DSSSL implementation, was technical lead of the XML working group, and also helped design and implement XSLT and XPath (not to mention expat, Trex / RELAX NG, etc)! It was totally flexible and incredibly powerful, but massively complicated, and you had to know scheme, which blew a lot of people's minds. But the major factor that killed SGML and DSSSL was the emergence of HTML, XML and XSLT, which were orders of magnitude simpler. James Clark: http://www.jclark.com/ http://www.jclark.com/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Clark_(programmer) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Clark_(programmer) There's a wonderful DDJ interview with James Clark called "A Triumph of Simplicity: James Clark on Markup Languages and XML" where he explains how a standard has failed if everyone just uses the reference implementation, because the point of a standard is to be crisp and simple enough that many different implementations can interoperate perfectly. A Triumph of Simplicity: James Clark on Markup Languages and XML: http://www.drdobbs.com/a-triumph-of-simplicity-james-clark-on-m/184404686 http://www.drdobbs.com/a-triumph-of-simplicity-james-clark-o... I think it's safe to say that SGML and DSSSL fell short of that sought-after simplicity, and XML and XSLT were the answer to that. "The standard has to be sufficiently simple that it makes sense to have multiple implementations." -James Clark My (completely imaginary) impression of the XSLT committee is that there must have been representatives of several different programming languages (Lisp, Prolog, C++, RPG, Brainfuck, etc) sitting around the conference table facing off with each other, and each managed to get a caricature of their language's cliche cool programming technique hammered into XSLT, but without the other context and support it needed to actually be useful. So nobody was happy! Then Microsoft came out with MSXML, with an XSL processor that let you include <script> tags in your XSLT documents to do all kinds of magic stuff by dynamically accessing the DOM and performing arbitrary computation (in VBScript, JavaScript, C#, or any IScriptingEngine compatible language). Once you hit a wall with XSLT you could drop down to JavaScript and actually get some work done. But after you got used to manipulating the DOM in JavaScript with XPath, you being to wonder what you ever needed XSLT for in the first place, and why you don't just write a nice flexible XML transformation library in JavaScript, and forget about XSLT. XSLT Stylesheet Scripting Using <msxsl:script>: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/standard/data/xml/xslt-stylesheet-scripting-using-msxsl-script https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/standard/data/xml/xs... Excerpts from the DDJ interview (it's fascinating -- read the whole thing!): >DDJ: You're well known for writing very good reference implementations for SGML and XML Standards. How important is it for these reference implementations to be good implementations as opposed to just something that works? >JC: Having a reference implementation that's too good can actually be a negative in some ways. >DDJ: Why is that? >JC: Well, because it discourages other people from implementing it. If you've got a standard, and you have only one real implementation, then you might as well not have bothered having a standard. You could have just defined the language by its implementation. The point of standards is that you can have multiple implementations, and they can all interoperate. >You want to make the standard sufficiently easy to implement so that it's not so much work to do an implementation that people are discouraged by the presence of a good reference implementation from doing their own implementation. >DDJ: Is that necessarily a bad thing? If you have a single implementation that's good enough so that other people don't feel like they have to write another implementation, don't you achieve what you want with a standard in that all implementations — in this case, there's only one of them — work the same? >JC: For any standard that's really useful, there are different kinds of usage scenarios and different classes of users, and you can't have one implementation that fits all. Take SGML, for example. Sometimes you want a really heavy-weight implementation that does validation and provides lots of information about a document. Sometimes you'd like a much lighter weight implementation that just runs as fast as possible, doesn't validate, and doesn't provide much information about a document apart from elements and attributes and data. But because it's so much work to write an SGML parser, you end up having one SGML parser that supports everything needed for a huge variety of applications, which makes it a lot more complicated. It would be much nicer if you had one SGML parser that is perfect for this application, and another SGML parser that is perfect for this other application. To make that possible, the standard has to be sufficiently simple that it makes sense to have multiple implementations. >DDJ: Is there any markup software out there that you like to use and that you haven't written yourself? >JC: The software I probably use most often that I haven't written myself is Microsoft's XML parser and XSLT implementation. Their current version does a pretty credible job of doing both XML and XSLT. It's remarkable, really. If you said, back when I was doing SGML and DSSSL, that one day, you'd find as a standard part of Windows this DLL that did pretty much the same thing as SGML and DSSSL, I'd think you were dreaming. That's one thing I feel very happy about, that this formerly niche thing is now available to everybody.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - kristopolous 6y ago
      Yeah sure. This is still pretty nascent distinction I'm thinking of but I think there's at least 2 types of innovators. Those that can delegate and cede the process of new ideas and fundamental control and know others will act in good faith and shepherd things to the finish line. Examples are TBL and Torvalds, who may be a tough cookie, but isn't involved in everything; IBM, Nvidia and Google do their thing. Then there is the other kind. There's not many kind words for these folks. They'll never delegate creativity or control, only tasks. Xanadu ideally, and at a previous time in actual documents, was envisioned as a proprietary publishing empire, you know as if you'd get a mythical Alan Kay Xanadu Dynabook that'd have all the dreams manifest. Sometimes these people are also really good and can make it happen, like Steve Jobs. But most of the time, they aren't good at something and not willing to cede it, something critical. Other times people aren't willing to do the work, it's too much of a barrier. These types of people can succeed marvelously in smaller ideas. The perfectionist restaurant where the all star chef controls everything is basically every michelin star restaurant explained. Same goes for great movies or music. Michael Jackson and Hitchcock were supposedly like this. It's just a harder model to make work for big ideas. So much harder it usually just can't be done. I really want a Nelson system but unless he can move himself to the TBL column and give way on crucial tenants, I really don't see it happening and having large adoption. These personality types seem distrustful of people like me, as if I'm going to steal their valor. I have invariably failed to explain that no, I want them to succeed, give me 0 dollars and 0 credit. I usually recommend don't even cede to me, but to some other, brilliant person, that I have no connection with. However, that's not compatible with their model of human motivation so their distrust becomes further entrenched, usually with me AND the recommendation. It's ugly. I don't know how to work with these brilliant people. For instance, Ted's micropayment system is essentially what Eich achieved using his BAT cryptocurrency in the Brave browser. He ceded massive controls to make it happen. Now places like Wikipedia and the Internet Archive are accepting BATs. A true Nelsonite would debate with me how Eich's BATs are no true Scotsman, and that's the problem. They're close enough damn it, let it go. You aren't always going to get a bull's-eye on the dart board of life. Make it a stepping stone, a pipeline to the true life, whatever, just don't dismiss the good as the enemy of the perfect. I'm sure the first iphone and first ipod wasn't all of Steve's ideas made manifest. Heck, if he didn't have a perfect favorable storm with Microsoft floating Apple during their late 90s antitrust, none of Apple's second spring would've happened either. Nelson's ideas work, that's what TBL proved with the w3, he just needs to structure them for success.
  - DonHopkins 6y ago
    I wrote about this on HN a few years ago, and Dave Winer's Userland Frontier discussion group a couple decades ago, after Xanadu released some open source code, which was actually the output of a Smalltalk=>C++ transpiler. (That code was actually from a team Autodesk, not directed by Ted Nelson -- see his reply below.) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16224154 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16224154 I think his biggest problem is that he refuses to collaborate with other people, or build on top of current technology. He's had a lot of great important inspirational ideas, but his implementation of those ideas didn't go anywhere, he's angry and bitter, and he hasn't bothered re-implementing them with any of the "inferior technologies" that he rejects. Back in 1999, project Xanadu released their source code as open source. It was a classic example of "open sourcing" something that was never going to ship otherwise, and that nobody could actually use or improve, just to get some attention ("open source" was a huge fad at the time). http://www.theregister.co.uk/1999/08/27/web_precursor_xanadu_project_goes/ http://www.theregister.co.uk/1999/08/27/web_precursor_xanadu... >Register believe it or not factoid: Nelson's book Computer Lib was at one point published by Microsoft Press. Oh yes. ® They originally wrote Xanadu in Smalltalk, then implemented a Smalltalk to C++ compiler, and finally they released the machine generated output of that compiler, which was unreadable and practically useless. It completely missed the point and purpose of "open source software". I looked at the code when it was released in 1999 and wrote up some initial reactions that Dave Winer asked me to post to his UserLand Frontier discussion group: http://static.userland.com/userlanddiscussarchive/msg010163.html http://static.userland.com/userlanddiscussarchive/msg010163.... http://static.userland.com/userlanddiscussarchive/msg010164.html http://static.userland.com/userlanddiscussarchive/msg010164.... http://static.userland.com/userlanddiscussarchive/msg010165.html http://static.userland.com/userlanddiscussarchive/msg010165.... http://static.userland.com/userlanddiscussarchive/msg010166.html http://static.userland.com/userlanddiscussarchive/msg010166.... http://static.userland.com/userlanddiscussarchive/msg010167.html http://static.userland.com/userlanddiscussarchive/msg010167.... A few excerpts (remember I wrote this in 1999 so some of the examples are dated): >Sheez. You don't actually believe anybody will be able to do anything useful with all that source code, do you? Take a look at the code. It's mostly uncommented glue gluing glue to glue. Nothing reusable there. >Have you gotten it running? The documentation included was not very helpful. Is there a web page that tells me how to run Xanadu? Did you have to install Python, and run it in a tty window? >What would be much more useful, would be some well written design documents and port-mortems, comparisons with current technologies like DHTML, XML, XLink, XPath, HyTime, XSL, etc, and proposals for extending current technologies and using them to capture the good ideas of Xanadu. >Has Xanadu been used to document its own source code? How does it compare to, say, the browseable cross-referenced mozilla source code? Or Knuth's classic Literate Programming work with TeX? >Last time I saw Ted Nelson talk (a few years ago at Ted Selker's NPUC workshop at IBM Almaden), he was quite bitter, but he didn't have anything positive to contribute. He talked about how he invented everything before anyone else, but everyone thought he was crazy, and how the world wide web totally sucks, but it's not his fault, if only they would have listened to him. And he verbally attacked a nice guy from Netscape (Martin Haeberli -- Paul's brother) for lame reasons, when there were plenty of other perfectly valid things to rag the poor guy about. >Don't get me wrong -- I've got my own old worn-out copy of the double sided Dream Machines / Computer Lib, as well as Literary Machines, which I enjoyed and found very inspiring. I first met the Xanadu guys some time ago in the 80's, when they were showing off Xanadu at the MIT AI lab. >I was a "random turist" high school kid visiting the AI lab on a pilgrimage. That was when I first met Hugh Daniel: this energetic excited big hairy hippie guy in a Xanadu baseball cap with wings, who I worked with later, hacking NeWS. Hugh and I worked together for two different companies porting NeWS to the Mac. >I "got" the hypertext demo they were showing (presumably the same code they've finally released -- that they were running on an Ann Arbor Ambassador, of course). I thought Xanadu was neat and important, but an obvious idea that had been around in many forms, that a lot of people were working on. It reminded me of the "info" documentation browser in emacs (but it wasn't programmable). >The fact that Xanadu didn't have a built-in extension language was a disappointment, since extensibility was an essential ingredient to the success of Emacs, HyperCard, Director, and the World Wide Web. >I would be much more interested in reading about why Xanadu failed, and how it was found to be inadequate, than how great it would have been if only it had taken over the world. >Anyway, my take on all this hyper-crap is that it's useless without a good scripting language. I think that's why Emacs was so successful, why HyperCard was so important, what made NeWS so interesting, why HyperLook was so powerful, why Director has been so successful, how it's possible for you to read this discussion board served by Frontier, and what made the World Wide Web what it is today: they all had extension languages built into them. >So what's Xanadu's scripting language story? Later on, in the second version, they obviously recognized the need for an interactive programming language like Smalltalk, for development. >But a real-world system like the World Wide Web is CONSTANTLY in development (witness all the stupid "under construction" icons), so the Xanadu back and front end developers aren't the only people who need the flexibility that only an extension language can provide. As JavaScript and the World Wide Web have proven, authors (the many people writing web pages) need extension languages at least as much as developers (the few people writing browsers and servers). >Ideally, an extension language should be designed into the system from day one. JavaScript kind of fits the bill, but was really just nailed onto the side of HTML as an afterthought, and is pretty kludgey compared to how it could have been. >That's Xanadu's problem too -- it tries to explain the entire universe from creation to collapse in terms of one grand unified theory, when all we need now are some practical techniques for rubbing sticks together to make fire, building shelters over our heads to keep the rain out, and convincing people to be nice and stop killing each other. The grandiose theories of Xanadu were certainly ahead of their time. >It's the same old story of gross practicality winning out over pure idealism. >Anyway, my point, as it relates to Xanadu, and is illustrated by COM (which has its own, more down-to-earth set of ideals), is that it's the interfaces, and the ideas and protocols behind them, that are important. Not the implementation. Code is (and should be) throw-away. >There's nothing wrong with publishing old code for educational purposes, to learn from its successes and mistakes, but don't waste your time trying to make it into something it's not. Ted replied to the HN thread: >The 1999 "source code" referred to above is in two parts: xu88, the design my group worked out in 1979, now called "Xanadu Green", described in my book "Literary Machines"; and a later design I repudiate, called "Udanax Gold", which the team at XOC (not under direction of Roger Gregory or myself) redesigned for four years until terminated by Autodesk. That's the one with the dual implementation in Smalltalk. They tried hard but not on my watch. Please distinguish between these two endeavors.
  - mimixco 6y ago
    It's funny because he said it would be open at first. How did you know or come to work with him?
ahmedfromtunis 6y ago
Ted Nelson, in his own words, in a video by Notion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JN1IBkAcJ1E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JN1IBkAcJ1E
- abalaji 6y ago
  Wow that was a really good interview. I especially liked his poignant quote at the end. "It's been very lonely. but I've been absolutely sure of what I've been doing all the time. One of the main definitions of paranoia is believing what nobody else believes; so, one cure is for the patient to change his mind and believe what the rest of the world believes: that is the low road. the other, by which I hope to cure myself, is to persuade everybody else. And, then I will no longer be paranoid [...]"
  - Judgmentality 6y ago
    Knowing nothing about this (I'd never heard of Xanadu before), it honestly sounds really sad. Maybe this guy really is passionate and he's obviously driven, but based on my cursory skimming he seems a combination of depressed, stubborn, and delusional. > In 2016, Nelson was interviewed by Werner Herzog in his documentary, Lo and Behold, Reveries of the Connected World. "By some, he was labeled insane for clinging on," Herzog said. "To us, you appear to be the only one who is clinically sane."[12] Nelson was delighted by the praise. "No one has ever said that before!" said Nelson. "Usually it's the other way around." I am not commenting on whether or not he is working on something important. It just seems after so many decades of...very little, you may be so deep into the sunk cost fallacy that it's almost a miniature mental illness. I wish him all the best, but this sounds like one of those really sad stories that you'll read 50 years after he's dead and just feel bad for the guy.
    - openfuture 6y ago
      Apt username. There is nothing sad about religious beliefs. We all have them but most people are not willing to own up to that. They'd rather just go with the flow and adopt the herd mentality. If you have the conviction and strength of will to go your own way then that is worthy of admiration imo and I think that holds irregardless of the morality of the path chosen. However if the motivation is based in charity then doubly so. From my point of view you are the 'sad' one (and me for caring enough to write this response). Judging people for dedicating their life to something they believe would lead to prosperity for others... it's so ugly. Show some respect.
Rochus 6y ago
Transclusion is a great concept which I first time saw and used in Jacobson's Objectory software engineering tool. It's also available in the CrossLine information manager (see https://github.com/rochus-keller/CrossLine https://github.com/rochus-keller/CrossLine).
- anotheryou 6y ago
  Roam Research also has them.
  - jaakl 6y ago
    Yep, and RR gives nice preview what web would look like with two-way links.
    - anotheryou 6y ago
      Just too bad it's also no open standard and for now in the cloud. I tried in for a little product review I did of a friends app. Once I was done I found out there is no good way to export any of it to anything readable... My choices where broken markdown or css-hacks for clean screenshots.
      - alfonsodev 6y ago
        Today the available formats are Markdown, JSON and EDN.
        anotheryou 6y ago
        JSON and EDN are not easily readable for humans. Markdown would be ok if it would translate well, it's made to be rendered as HTML after all. A new line in markdown however is not the same as a new line in roam, but in the export it is treated like it is. If you render the exported markdown as html you will have a lot of paragraphs broken (and maybe lists too, don't quite remember). edit: look: roam | markdown | html https://i.imgur.com/2WGJGsY.png https://i.imgur.com/2WGJGsY.png
anotherhue 6y ago
Not only is the Xanadu system fascinating, but the odyssey of its on-and-off development should be required reading for any software professional.
aeturnum 6y ago
Ah Xanadu! I always think of the 1995 "The Curse of Xanadu" in wired[1], both because it's good and because it's from an age when the idea of universal connection felt much further away. [1] https://www.wired.com/1995/06/xanadu/ https://www.wired.com/1995/06/xanadu/
- LeonB 6y ago
  Ted Nelson’s response to wired is an interesting read: http://web.archive.org/web/20001101230424/http://www2.educ.ksu.edu/Faculty/McGrathD/Fall99/NelsonLtr.htm http://web.archive.org/web/20001101230424/http://www2.educ.k...
- johnchristopher 6y ago
  So, last time I mentioned that article on HN (and with the same enthusiasm you display) a nice fellow completed my post (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15270358 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15270358) with this: > If that's the case could you please post Nelson's responses http://web.archive.org/web/20001101230424/http://www2.educ.ksu.edu/Faculty/McGrathD/Fall99/NelsonLtr.htm http://web.archive.org/web/20001101230424/http://www2.educ.k... http://web.archive.org/web/20001003011753/http://xanadu.com.au/ararat http://web.archive.org/web/20001003011753/http://xanadu.com.... along with it.j :)
  - aeturnum 6y ago
    Oh thanks! I didn't know that he'd responded.
  - Rumperuu 6y ago
    Also, if anyone really wants to find out Nelson's thoughts on that article, he recently (Aug 2020) released a feature-length video addressing it and its lasting impact. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ASgjSxNdDqI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ASgjSxNdDqI
- karlicoss 6y ago
  Nelson's "Computers for Cynics" is also an interesting take https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLTI2Kz0V2OFlgbkROVmzkfQRW2FrX2KfR https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLTI2Kz0V2OFlgbkROVmzk...
7thaccount 6y ago
There is an amazing indy video game called "Kentucky Route Zero" which is an adventure esque game where you explore a mysterious magical road in Kentucky and meet all sorts of fantastical people and creatures. It is bizarre and the genre is probably best described as magical surrealism. Anyway Spoilers when going through one of the caves, you meat these bizarre computer science researchers who have an old mainframe named Xanadu. It's all a reference to the actual project that shot for the moon and just kinda got left behind. Interesting historical tidbits shoved in the game.
thih9 6y ago
OpenXanadu demo (2014): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KIOuRuvQ10c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KIOuRuvQ10c
duckfang 6y ago
I completely reject Project Xanadu, for one primary reason: it turns an open web into a per-page paywall DRM horror. And where money comes, user tracking and anti-privacy tech follows. Right now, it takes time and effort to paywall stuff. It's not super hard, but is not a seamless flip-a-switch-on paywall. With Xanadu, that paywall is built in at the core - request a page, pay the cost, get the page and hope its what you want. And I can only imagine the level of scrape-scams at that level - spam would be not only viable but make money per click. Sure, I could imagine useful tools to prevent hemorrhaging money, but the threat of clicking links and owing 1-10$ for that is horrifying. Hard pass. It does deserve a study in its technology and closed-sourceness when it was devised. But it needs to stay in the scrap-bin of history.
- zozbot234 6y ago
  > With Xanadu, that paywall is built in at the core HTTP also has builtin paywalls via the 402 error code. I'm not sure that there's much practical difference.
  - gkop 6y ago
    Existence of 402 doesn’t really say much. 418 and 451 are probably just as popular error codes as 402, but nobody would argue any of these codes are a material part of the HTTP core. Moreover, there’s no special functional purpose to 402, not in the RFC and not real life.
  - chipotle_coyote 6y ago
    You mean this one? The one that no browser actually does anything with? https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Status/402 https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Status/402 "The HTTP 402 Payment Required is a nonstandard client error status response code that is reserved for future use." Of course, I guess "this is actually just a concept now but we promise it will be meaningful in the future" is actually something HTTP 402 has in common with Project Xanadu. (zing!)
- kmeisthax 6y ago
  I don't remember DRM being mentioned in all of the Ted Nelson stuff I've read - I think the idea he had was that just having microtransactions and transclusion would be enough to put copyright concerns aside. This is a sentiment that has aged like a fine milk, of course. In the Xanadu world, every new book published would be posted online for purchase, but also transcludable; you could remix the work and the transclusion system would ensure the publisher got paid for the part of the work you used by having the system just pass the payments along across each transcluded work. Effectively, you'd publish your remix in the form of a Git diff or IPS file (Ted used the metaphor of Edit Decision Lists) and your browser would just buy the pages of the book that were copied from and paste them into the remixed work. This is, of course, not how copyright works in the slightest. First off, most people with valuable works do not want to automatically authorize remixes or modifications of their work even if they do get paid. They want to have prior restraint and exclusive license agreements with specific users of their work for the sake of brand maintenance. There is no legal basis for transclusive remixing of content (see Micro Star v. Form Gen). On the flip-side, if someone were to write, say, a review of a work; the copyright owner is entitled to no control or remuneration whatsoever for any quotations you use in that review. That's called "fair use" and it can only be adjudicated by a judge, not a computer program. BTW, what I'm talking about already exists, it's called YouTube Content ID. YouTube runs literally every upload they have against a database of copyright samples to effectively generate a list of transclusion backlinks after-the-fact. All the problems I mentioned above are problems with YouTube Content ID, not Xanadu - there are plenty of publishers whose policy is "block", and it is their right to do that; making a fair use of content will trip the filters and you have to argue with YouTube to do what you are legally entitled to do, etc. It is entirely an engineer's view of copyright law, which is just laughably bad.
gumby 6y ago
It was clear that the WWW was a good idea but it clearly wouldn’t succeed because of the foolish decision not to have back links. But it might gain a bit of traction and make people receptive for the real thing. I attended more than one significant academic conference in the early 90s where this belief was uttered to general agreement. People had even already experienced broken links and yet couldn’t put 2 and 2 together. I also wanted bidirectional links even though I was a Lisp programmer! In case it’s not clear, one way links was an inspired decision. Another belief, in the latter part of the 90s, was that decent web search was basically impossible as someone would have to store a copy of the whole thing, which is clearly impossible.
- kmeisthax 6y ago
  How would you practically implement robust backlinks in a distributed hypertext system to begin with?
  - DaiPlusPlus 6y ago
    Technically they exist in HTML+HTTP via the (mispelled) `Referer` header. It sucks that cross-site Referer sharing is seemingly being phased out by browsers in the name of user-privacy (as referer URIs do often contain PII), but there are more cynical explanations afoot which I won’t go into. Another approach is having a central link-repository that works as an overlay on the fully distributed web - this could be provided by search-engines. Another approach is a distributed link database. I’m sure some clever DHT system could be used to allow practically anyone to participate without needing nodes to hold a copy of the full database (a-la Bitcoin), or even one that allows directly-relevant nodes (e.g. a website’s own node) to stores only it’s own bi-di links and not waste resources on unaffiliated content. Of course, all of this assumes that spam, trolling, griefing, etc don’t exist :) For all the talk WWW gets about being a distributed system... it isn’t: it’s more of a federation of systems united only by their common use of HTML+HTTP and (hopefully) RESTful resource architecture. A true distributed WWW would be some horrible mix of IPFS, BitTorrent and Ethereum. I think that’s how Roko's Basilisk will come into existence...
    - 6y ago
dang 6y ago
If curious, past threads: Xanadu Basics – Visible Connection (2018) [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20258942 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20258942 - June 2019 (25 comments) “Xanadu Hypertext Documents” architecture and data structures, 2019 edition - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19745517 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19745517 - April 2019 (1 comment) Project Xanadu - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19710142 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19710142 - April 2019 (32 comments) Ted Nelson's Pre-Final Reply to “The Curse of Xanadu” by Gary Wolf / Gory Jackal - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19672373 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19672373 - April 2019 (1 comment) Getting to Xanadu - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18635123 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18635123 - Dec 2018 (55 comments) Xanadu - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15269827 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15269827 - Sept 2017 (86 comments) Ted Nelson presents a working prototype version of Xanadu - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12386339 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12386339 - Aug 2016 (1 comment) Roads to Xanadu - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10642143 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10642143 - Nov 2015 (6 comments) The Xanadu Parallel Universe - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10470068 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10470068 - Oct 2015 (2 comments) Xanadu: we have a working deliverable - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7849389 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7849389 - June 2014 (99 comments) The Curse of Xanadu (1995) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4160525 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4160525 - June 2012 (2 comments) The Curse of Xanadu (1995) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1583311 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1583311 - Aug 2010 (6 comments) How Xanadu Works: technical overview - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=962315 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=962315 - Nov 2009 (5 comments) The Xanadu Dream - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=876469 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=876469 - Oct 2009 (15 comments) The Curse of Xanadu - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=795155 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=795155 - Aug 2009 (18 comments) Others?
qwerty456127 6y ago
Isn't this something like Roam/Obsidian, just more complicated&academic to the point of unimplementability?
- karlicoss 6y ago
  An alternative (e.g. Nelson's) point of view would be that Roam/Obsidian is a dumbed down and crippled version of his vision. But yes, hard to deny the point about unimplementability
teddyh 6y ago
In 1988, Autodesk (makers of AutoCAD) was so impressed by the Xanadu project that they gave them financial backing. After four years, Autodesk gave up: > […] Come 1992, the “resources of Autodesk” were still funding “talent of the Xanadu team” which had not, as of that date, produced anything remotely like a production prototype—in fact, nothing as impressive as the 88.1x prototype which existed before Autodesk invested in Xanadu. On August 21, 1992 Autodesk decided to pull the plug and give its interest in Xanadu back to the Xanadudes. (Quoted from footnote linked from this page: https://www.fourmilab.ch/autofile/e5/chapter2_64.html https://www.fourmilab.ch/autofile/e5/chapter2_64.html)
- mistrial9 6y ago
  yeah, but I worked on a *nix workstation configured by Autodesk at that time, and the engineers that set it up casually mentioned that it had taken a month.. What that snippet says to me, plus the context at the time, was that is was deeply arcane to work on "servers" and that delays of weeks were common when "configuring" the thing. In fact, even booting hardware was a specialty, and a diversity of hardware existed that might surprise someone born in the 90s or later. I was sympathetic to the "Xanadudes" but also personally saw the sort of unrealizable side to their particular efforts. "Tilting at Windmills" seemed to be a fitting description.
egotripper 6y ago
I did not see this article directly linked in the comments: https://www.wired.com/1995/06/xanadu/ https://www.wired.com/1995/06/xanadu/
shp0ngle 6y ago
did anyone tried putting xanadu on a blockchain with ICO and all

Project Xanadu

132 points by alokrai 6y ago

mimixco 6y ago

Getting to Xanadu: https://mimix.io/en/blog/xanadu https://mimix.io/en/blog/xanadu

kristopolous 6y ago
There's no GitHub because Ted doesn't believe in open source. He's not on board with open systems at all We don't talk anymore because of that disagreement. I tried to convince him to blow the thing open and tried to explain how that's how projects get accelerated. Nope, not happening.
- dwohnitmok 6y ago
  I mean open systems would be fundamentally in tension with the whole idea of paid, proprietary transclusion that's one of the central pillars of Xanadu right?
  - anotheryou 6y ago
    I'd say to make transclusions with the micro transactions work it has to be an open standard. It needs browser support and people willing to use it encoding their work.
    - dwohnitmok 6y ago
      Ah sorry I don't mean the mechanism itself, I was referring to the content. Although even in the case of the standard, leaving aside whether this would make Xanadu feasible or not, I'm not sure given Xanadu's history whether it was ever conceived of being "open" in the same way, say HTML is. There are plenty of standards that are effectively closed and require payment to access and read (see e.g. ISO standards as well as, in the U.S. the state of Georgia very nearly getting away with putting legally-binding annotations behind a paywall: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/04/supreme-court-rules-georgia-cant-put-the-law-behind-a-paywall/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/04/supreme-court-ru...). I think Xanadu's philosophy would've lent it to a similar approach, independent of what this would mean for its survival.
      - tannhaeuser 6y ago
        That you've got to pay for a copy of many (but not all [1]) ISO standards doesn't make them closed. Lack of funding for standardization work and the expectation that everything must be had at no cost is what gets you monopolies and dominating players, such as with so-called web standards. Nothing new really; citing from a post by Paul Prescod from 1997 in the context of subsetting XML from SGML [2]: > Are you happy with the process for developing and improving HTML? Do you feel that the results are of high quality? Do you think that you've had sufficient input? [...] > In order to influence ISO standards you need only be recognized as an expert in your country. Unless your country is an oligarchy or dictatorship, this will cost you very little or nothing at all [...] [1]: https://standards.iso.org/ittf/PubliclyAvailableStandards/index.html https://standards.iso.org/ittf/PubliclyAvailableStandards/in... (beware comically broken page on mobile) [2]: http://lists.xml.org/archives/xml-dev/199710/msg00189.html http://lists.xml.org/archives/xml-dev/199710/msg00189.html
        DonHopkins 6y ago
        Here's another comment I wrote in the HN discussion from a couple years ago about "Ted Nelson on What Modern Programmers Can Learn from the Past [video] (ieee.org)", in which James Clark talked about his role in the transition from SGML to XML, and the value of standards being sufficiently simple to have multiple interoperable implementations: IEEE Article and video about "Ted Nelson on What Modern Programmers Can Learn from the Past": https://spectrum.ieee.org/video/geek-life/profiles/ted-nelson-on-what-modern-programmers-can-learn-from-the-past https://spectrum.ieee.org/video/geek-life/profiles/ted-nelso... HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16222520 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16222520 My comment and quotes from the DDJ interview of James Clark, "The Triumph of Simplicity": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16227249 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16227249 In the ideal world we would all be using s-expressions and Lisp, but now XML and JSON fill the need of language-independent data formats. >Not trying to defend XSLT (which I find to be a mixed bag), but you're aware that it's precursor was DSSSL (Scheme), with pretty much a one-to-one correspondence of language constructs and symbol names, aren't you? The mighty programmer James Clark wrote the de-facto reference SGML parser and DSSSL implementation, was technical lead of the XML working group, and also helped design and implement XSLT and XPath (not to mention expat, Trex / RELAX NG, etc)! It was totally flexible and incredibly powerful, but massively complicated, and you had to know scheme, which blew a lot of people's minds. But the major factor that killed SGML and DSSSL was the emergence of HTML, XML and XSLT, which were orders of magnitude simpler. James Clark: http://www.jclark.com/ http://www.jclark.com/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Clark_(programmer) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Clark_(programmer) There's a wonderful DDJ interview with James Clark called "A Triumph of Simplicity: James Clark on Markup Languages and XML" where he explains how a standard has failed if everyone just uses the reference implementation, because the point of a standard is to be crisp and simple enough that many different implementations can interoperate perfectly. A Triumph of Simplicity: James Clark on Markup Languages and XML: http://www.drdobbs.com/a-triumph-of-simplicity-james-clark-on-m/184404686 http://www.drdobbs.com/a-triumph-of-simplicity-james-clark-o... I think it's safe to say that SGML and DSSSL fell short of that sought-after simplicity, and XML and XSLT were the answer to that. "The standard has to be sufficiently simple that it makes sense to have multiple implementations." -James Clark My (completely imaginary) impression of the XSLT committee is that there must have been representatives of several different programming languages (Lisp, Prolog, C++, RPG, Brainfuck, etc) sitting around the conference table facing off with each other, and each managed to get a caricature of their language's cliche cool programming technique hammered into XSLT, but without the other context and support it needed to actually be useful. So nobody was happy! Then Microsoft came out with MSXML, with an XSL processor that let you include <script> tags in your XSLT documents to do all kinds of magic stuff by dynamically accessing the DOM and performing arbitrary computation (in VBScript, JavaScript, C#, or any IScriptingEngine compatible language). Once you hit a wall with XSLT you could drop down to JavaScript and actually get some work done. But after you got used to manipulating the DOM in JavaScript with XPath, you being to wonder what you ever needed XSLT for in the first place, and why you don't just write a nice flexible XML transformation library in JavaScript, and forget about XSLT. XSLT Stylesheet Scripting Using <msxsl:script>: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/standard/data/xml/xslt-stylesheet-scripting-using-msxsl-script https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/standard/data/xml/xs... Excerpts from the DDJ interview (it's fascinating -- read the whole thing!): >DDJ: You're well known for writing very good reference implementations for SGML and XML Standards. How important is it for these reference implementations to be good implementations as opposed to just something that works? >JC: Having a reference implementation that's too good can actually be a negative in some ways. >DDJ: Why is that? >JC: Well, because it discourages other people from implementing it. If you've got a standard, and you have only one real implementation, then you might as well not have bothered having a standard. You could have just defined the language by its implementation. The point of standards is that you can have multiple implementations, and they can all interoperate. >You want to make the standard sufficiently easy to implement so that it's not so much work to do an implementation that people are discouraged by the presence of a good reference implementation from doing their own implementation. >DDJ: Is that necessarily a bad thing? If you have a single implementation that's good enough so that other people don't feel like they have to write another implementation, don't you achieve what you want with a standard in that all implementations — in this case, there's only one of them — work the same? >JC: For any standard that's really useful, there are different kinds of usage scenarios and different classes of users, and you can't have one implementation that fits all. Take SGML, for example. Sometimes you want a really heavy-weight implementation that does validation and provides lots of information about a document. Sometimes you'd like a much lighter weight implementation that just runs as fast as possible, doesn't validate, and doesn't provide much information about a document apart from elements and attributes and data. But because it's so much work to write an SGML parser, you end up having one SGML parser that supports everything needed for a huge variety of applications, which makes it a lot more complicated. It would be much nicer if you had one SGML parser that is perfect for this application, and another SGML parser that is perfect for this other application. To make that possible, the standard has to be sufficiently simple that it makes sense to have multiple implementations. >DDJ: Is there any markup software out there that you like to use and that you haven't written yourself? >JC: The software I probably use most often that I haven't written myself is Microsoft's XML parser and XSLT implementation. Their current version does a pretty credible job of doing both XML and XSLT. It's remarkable, really. If you said, back when I was doing SGML and DSSSL, that one day, you'd find as a standard part of Windows this DLL that did pretty much the same thing as SGML and DSSSL, I'd think you were dreaming. That's one thing I feel very happy about, that this formerly niche thing is now available to everybody.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - kristopolous 6y ago
    Yeah sure. This is still pretty nascent distinction I'm thinking of but I think there's at least 2 types of innovators. Those that can delegate and cede the process of new ideas and fundamental control and know others will act in good faith and shepherd things to the finish line. Examples are TBL and Torvalds, who may be a tough cookie, but isn't involved in everything; IBM, Nvidia and Google do their thing. Then there is the other kind. There's not many kind words for these folks. They'll never delegate creativity or control, only tasks. Xanadu ideally, and at a previous time in actual documents, was envisioned as a proprietary publishing empire, you know as if you'd get a mythical Alan Kay Xanadu Dynabook that'd have all the dreams manifest. Sometimes these people are also really good and can make it happen, like Steve Jobs. But most of the time, they aren't good at something and not willing to cede it, something critical. Other times people aren't willing to do the work, it's too much of a barrier. These types of people can succeed marvelously in smaller ideas. The perfectionist restaurant where the all star chef controls everything is basically every michelin star restaurant explained. Same goes for great movies or music. Michael Jackson and Hitchcock were supposedly like this. It's just a harder model to make work for big ideas. So much harder it usually just can't be done. I really want a Nelson system but unless he can move himself to the TBL column and give way on crucial tenants, I really don't see it happening and having large adoption. These personality types seem distrustful of people like me, as if I'm going to steal their valor. I have invariably failed to explain that no, I want them to succeed, give me 0 dollars and 0 credit. I usually recommend don't even cede to me, but to some other, brilliant person, that I have no connection with. However, that's not compatible with their model of human motivation so their distrust becomes further entrenched, usually with me AND the recommendation. It's ugly. I don't know how to work with these brilliant people. For instance, Ted's micropayment system is essentially what Eich achieved using his BAT cryptocurrency in the Brave browser. He ceded massive controls to make it happen. Now places like Wikipedia and the Internet Archive are accepting BATs. A true Nelsonite would debate with me how Eich's BATs are no true Scotsman, and that's the problem. They're close enough damn it, let it go. You aren't always going to get a bull's-eye on the dart board of life. Make it a stepping stone, a pipeline to the true life, whatever, just don't dismiss the good as the enemy of the perfect. I'm sure the first iphone and first ipod wasn't all of Steve's ideas made manifest. Heck, if he didn't have a perfect favorable storm with Microsoft floating Apple during their late 90s antitrust, none of Apple's second spring would've happened either. Nelson's ideas work, that's what TBL proved with the w3, he just needs to structure them for success.
- DonHopkins 6y ago
  I wrote about this on HN a few years ago, and Dave Winer's Userland Frontier discussion group a couple decades ago, after Xanadu released some open source code, which was actually the output of a Smalltalk=>C++ transpiler. (That code was actually from a team Autodesk, not directed by Ted Nelson -- see his reply below.) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16224154 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16224154 I think his biggest problem is that he refuses to collaborate with other people, or build on top of current technology. He's had a lot of great important inspirational ideas, but his implementation of those ideas didn't go anywhere, he's angry and bitter, and he hasn't bothered re-implementing them with any of the "inferior technologies" that he rejects. Back in 1999, project Xanadu released their source code as open source. It was a classic example of "open sourcing" something that was never going to ship otherwise, and that nobody could actually use or improve, just to get some attention ("open source" was a huge fad at the time). http://www.theregister.co.uk/1999/08/27/web_precursor_xanadu_project_goes/ http://www.theregister.co.uk/1999/08/27/web_precursor_xanadu... >Register believe it or not factoid: Nelson's book Computer Lib was at one point published by Microsoft Press. Oh yes. ® They originally wrote Xanadu in Smalltalk, then implemented a Smalltalk to C++ compiler, and finally they released the machine generated output of that compiler, which was unreadable and practically useless. It completely missed the point and purpose of "open source software". I looked at the code when it was released in 1999 and wrote up some initial reactions that Dave Winer asked me to post to his UserLand Frontier discussion group: http://static.userland.com/userlanddiscussarchive/msg010163.html http://static.userland.com/userlanddiscussarchive/msg010163.... http://static.userland.com/userlanddiscussarchive/msg010164.html http://static.userland.com/userlanddiscussarchive/msg010164.... http://static.userland.com/userlanddiscussarchive/msg010165.html http://static.userland.com/userlanddiscussarchive/msg010165.... http://static.userland.com/userlanddiscussarchive/msg010166.html http://static.userland.com/userlanddiscussarchive/msg010166.... http://static.userland.com/userlanddiscussarchive/msg010167.html http://static.userland.com/userlanddiscussarchive/msg010167.... A few excerpts (remember I wrote this in 1999 so some of the examples are dated): >Sheez. You don't actually believe anybody will be able to do anything useful with all that source code, do you? Take a look at the code. It's mostly uncommented glue gluing glue to glue. Nothing reusable there. >Have you gotten it running? The documentation included was not very helpful. Is there a web page that tells me how to run Xanadu? Did you have to install Python, and run it in a tty window? >What would be much more useful, would be some well written design documents and port-mortems, comparisons with current technologies like DHTML, XML, XLink, XPath, HyTime, XSL, etc, and proposals for extending current technologies and using them to capture the good ideas of Xanadu. >Has Xanadu been used to document its own source code? How does it compare to, say, the browseable cross-referenced mozilla source code? Or Knuth's classic Literate Programming work with TeX? >Last time I saw Ted Nelson talk (a few years ago at Ted Selker's NPUC workshop at IBM Almaden), he was quite bitter, but he didn't have anything positive to contribute. He talked about how he invented everything before anyone else, but everyone thought he was crazy, and how the world wide web totally sucks, but it's not his fault, if only they would have listened to him. And he verbally attacked a nice guy from Netscape (Martin Haeberli -- Paul's brother) for lame reasons, when there were plenty of other perfectly valid things to rag the poor guy about. >Don't get me wrong -- I've got my own old worn-out copy of the double sided Dream Machines / Computer Lib, as well as Literary Machines, which I enjoyed and found very inspiring. I first met the Xanadu guys some time ago in the 80's, when they were showing off Xanadu at the MIT AI lab. >I was a "random turist" high school kid visiting the AI lab on a pilgrimage. That was when I first met Hugh Daniel: this energetic excited big hairy hippie guy in a Xanadu baseball cap with wings, who I worked with later, hacking NeWS. Hugh and I worked together for two different companies porting NeWS to the Mac. >I "got" the hypertext demo they were showing (presumably the same code they've finally released -- that they were running on an Ann Arbor Ambassador, of course). I thought Xanadu was neat and important, but an obvious idea that had been around in many forms, that a lot of people were working on. It reminded me of the "info" documentation browser in emacs (but it wasn't programmable). >The fact that Xanadu didn't have a built-in extension language was a disappointment, since extensibility was an essential ingredient to the success of Emacs, HyperCard, Director, and the World Wide Web. >I would be much more interested in reading about why Xanadu failed, and how it was found to be inadequate, than how great it would have been if only it had taken over the world. >Anyway, my take on all this hyper-crap is that it's useless without a good scripting language. I think that's why Emacs was so successful, why HyperCard was so important, what made NeWS so interesting, why HyperLook was so powerful, why Director has been so successful, how it's possible for you to read this discussion board served by Frontier, and what made the World Wide Web what it is today: they all had extension languages built into them. >So what's Xanadu's scripting language story? Later on, in the second version, they obviously recognized the need for an interactive programming language like Smalltalk, for development. >But a real-world system like the World Wide Web is CONSTANTLY in development (witness all the stupid "under construction" icons), so the Xanadu back and front end developers aren't the only people who need the flexibility that only an extension language can provide. As JavaScript and the World Wide Web have proven, authors (the many people writing web pages) need extension languages at least as much as developers (the few people writing browsers and servers). >Ideally, an extension language should be designed into the system from day one. JavaScript kind of fits the bill, but was really just nailed onto the side of HTML as an afterthought, and is pretty kludgey compared to how it could have been. >That's Xanadu's problem too -- it tries to explain the entire universe from creation to collapse in terms of one grand unified theory, when all we need now are some practical techniques for rubbing sticks together to make fire, building shelters over our heads to keep the rain out, and convincing people to be nice and stop killing each other. The grandiose theories of Xanadu were certainly ahead of their time. >It's the same old story of gross practicality winning out over pure idealism. >Anyway, my point, as it relates to Xanadu, and is illustrated by COM (which has its own, more down-to-earth set of ideals), is that it's the interfaces, and the ideas and protocols behind them, that are important. Not the implementation. Code is (and should be) throw-away. >There's nothing wrong with publishing old code for educational purposes, to learn from its successes and mistakes, but don't waste your time trying to make it into something it's not. Ted replied to the HN thread: >The 1999 "source code" referred to above is in two parts: xu88, the design my group worked out in 1979, now called "Xanadu Green", described in my book "Literary Machines"; and a later design I repudiate, called "Udanax Gold", which the team at XOC (not under direction of Roger Gregory or myself) redesigned for four years until terminated by Autodesk. That's the one with the dual implementation in Smalltalk. They tried hard but not on my watch. Please distinguish between these two endeavors.
- mimixco 6y ago
  It's funny because he said it would be open at first. How did you know or come to work with him?

ahmedfromtunis 6y ago

Ted Nelson, in his own words, in a video by Notion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JN1IBkAcJ1E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JN1IBkAcJ1E

abalaji 6y ago
Wow that was a really good interview. I especially liked his poignant quote at the end. "It's been very lonely. but I've been absolutely sure of what I've been doing all the time. One of the main definitions of paranoia is believing what nobody else believes; so, one cure is for the patient to change his mind and believe what the rest of the world believes: that is the low road. the other, by which I hope to cure myself, is to persuade everybody else. And, then I will no longer be paranoid [...]"
- Judgmentality 6y ago
  Knowing nothing about this (I'd never heard of Xanadu before), it honestly sounds really sad. Maybe this guy really is passionate and he's obviously driven, but based on my cursory skimming he seems a combination of depressed, stubborn, and delusional. > In 2016, Nelson was interviewed by Werner Herzog in his documentary, Lo and Behold, Reveries of the Connected World. "By some, he was labeled insane for clinging on," Herzog said. "To us, you appear to be the only one who is clinically sane."[12] Nelson was delighted by the praise. "No one has ever said that before!" said Nelson. "Usually it's the other way around." I am not commenting on whether or not he is working on something important. It just seems after so many decades of...very little, you may be so deep into the sunk cost fallacy that it's almost a miniature mental illness. I wish him all the best, but this sounds like one of those really sad stories that you'll read 50 years after he's dead and just feel bad for the guy.
  - openfuture 6y ago
    Apt username. There is nothing sad about religious beliefs. We all have them but most people are not willing to own up to that. They'd rather just go with the flow and adopt the herd mentality. If you have the conviction and strength of will to go your own way then that is worthy of admiration imo and I think that holds irregardless of the morality of the path chosen. However if the motivation is based in charity then doubly so. From my point of view you are the 'sad' one (and me for caring enough to write this response). Judging people for dedicating their life to something they believe would lead to prosperity for others... it's so ugly. Show some respect.

Rochus 6y ago

Transclusion is a great concept which I first time saw and used in Jacobson's Objectory software engineering tool. It's also available in the CrossLine information manager (see https://github.com/rochus-keller/CrossLine https://github.com/rochus-keller/CrossLine).

anotheryou 6y ago
Roam Research also has them.
- jaakl 6y ago
  Yep, and RR gives nice preview what web would look like with two-way links.
  - anotheryou 6y ago
    Just too bad it's also no open standard and for now in the cloud. I tried in for a little product review I did of a friends app. Once I was done I found out there is no good way to export any of it to anything readable... My choices where broken markdown or css-hacks for clean screenshots.
    - alfonsodev 6y ago
      Today the available formats are Markdown, JSON and EDN.
      - anotheryou 6y ago
        JSON and EDN are not easily readable for humans. Markdown would be ok if it would translate well, it's made to be rendered as HTML after all. A new line in markdown however is not the same as a new line in roam, but in the export it is treated like it is. If you render the exported markdown as html you will have a lot of paragraphs broken (and maybe lists too, don't quite remember). edit: look: roam | markdown | html https://i.imgur.com/2WGJGsY.png https://i.imgur.com/2WGJGsY.png

anotherhue 6y ago

Not only is the Xanadu system fascinating, but the odyssey of its on-and-off development should be required reading for any software professional.

aeturnum 6y ago

Ah Xanadu! I always think of the 1995 "The Curse of Xanadu" in wired[1], both because it's good and because it's from an age when the idea of universal connection felt much further away. [1] https://www.wired.com/1995/06/xanadu/ https://www.wired.com/1995/06/xanadu/

LeonB 6y ago
Ted Nelson’s response to wired is an interesting read: http://web.archive.org/web/20001101230424/http://www2.educ.ksu.edu/Faculty/McGrathD/Fall99/NelsonLtr.htm http://web.archive.org/web/20001101230424/http://www2.educ.k...
johnchristopher 6y ago
So, last time I mentioned that article on HN (and with the same enthusiasm you display) a nice fellow completed my post (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15270358 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15270358) with this: > If that's the case could you please post Nelson's responses http://web.archive.org/web/20001101230424/http://www2.educ.ksu.edu/Faculty/McGrathD/Fall99/NelsonLtr.htm http://web.archive.org/web/20001101230424/http://www2.educ.k... http://web.archive.org/web/20001003011753/http://xanadu.com.au/ararat http://web.archive.org/web/20001003011753/http://xanadu.com.... along with it.j :)
- aeturnum 6y ago
  Oh thanks! I didn't know that he'd responded.
- Rumperuu 6y ago
  Also, if anyone really wants to find out Nelson's thoughts on that article, he recently (Aug 2020) released a feature-length video addressing it and its lasting impact. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ASgjSxNdDqI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ASgjSxNdDqI
karlicoss 6y ago
Nelson's "Computers for Cynics" is also an interesting take https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLTI2Kz0V2OFlgbkROVmzkfQRW2FrX2KfR https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLTI2Kz0V2OFlgbkROVmzk...

7thaccount 6y ago

There is an amazing indy video game called "Kentucky Route Zero" which is an adventure esque game where you explore a mysterious magical road in Kentucky and meet all sorts of fantastical people and creatures. It is bizarre and the genre is probably best described as magical surrealism. Anyway Spoilers when going through one of the caves, you meat these bizarre computer science researchers who have an old mainframe named Xanadu. It's all a reference to the actual project that shot for the moon and just kinda got left behind. Interesting historical tidbits shoved in the game.

thih9 6y ago

OpenXanadu demo (2014): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KIOuRuvQ10c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KIOuRuvQ10c

duckfang 6y ago

I completely reject Project Xanadu, for one primary reason: it turns an open web into a per-page paywall DRM horror. And where money comes, user tracking and anti-privacy tech follows. Right now, it takes time and effort to paywall stuff. It's not super hard, but is not a seamless flip-a-switch-on paywall. With Xanadu, that paywall is built in at the core - request a page, pay the cost, get the page and hope its what you want. And I can only imagine the level of scrape-scams at that level - spam would be not only viable but make money per click. Sure, I could imagine useful tools to prevent hemorrhaging money, but the threat of clicking links and owing 1-10$ for that is horrifying. Hard pass. It does deserve a study in its technology and closed-sourceness when it was devised. But it needs to stay in the scrap-bin of history.

zozbot234 6y ago
> With Xanadu, that paywall is built in at the core HTTP also has builtin paywalls via the 402 error code. I'm not sure that there's much practical difference.
- gkop 6y ago
  Existence of 402 doesn’t really say much. 418 and 451 are probably just as popular error codes as 402, but nobody would argue any of these codes are a material part of the HTTP core. Moreover, there’s no special functional purpose to 402, not in the RFC and not real life.
- chipotle_coyote 6y ago
  You mean this one? The one that no browser actually does anything with? https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Status/402 https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Status/402 "The HTTP 402 Payment Required is a nonstandard client error status response code that is reserved for future use." Of course, I guess "this is actually just a concept now but we promise it will be meaningful in the future" is actually something HTTP 402 has in common with Project Xanadu. (zing!)
kmeisthax 6y ago
I don't remember DRM being mentioned in all of the Ted Nelson stuff I've read - I think the idea he had was that just having microtransactions and transclusion would be enough to put copyright concerns aside. This is a sentiment that has aged like a fine milk, of course. In the Xanadu world, every new book published would be posted online for purchase, but also transcludable; you could remix the work and the transclusion system would ensure the publisher got paid for the part of the work you used by having the system just pass the payments along across each transcluded work. Effectively, you'd publish your remix in the form of a Git diff or IPS file (Ted used the metaphor of Edit Decision Lists) and your browser would just buy the pages of the book that were copied from and paste them into the remixed work. This is, of course, not how copyright works in the slightest. First off, most people with valuable works do not want to automatically authorize remixes or modifications of their work even if they do get paid. They want to have prior restraint and exclusive license agreements with specific users of their work for the sake of brand maintenance. There is no legal basis for transclusive remixing of content (see Micro Star v. Form Gen). On the flip-side, if someone were to write, say, a review of a work; the copyright owner is entitled to no control or remuneration whatsoever for any quotations you use in that review. That's called "fair use" and it can only be adjudicated by a judge, not a computer program. BTW, what I'm talking about already exists, it's called YouTube Content ID. YouTube runs literally every upload they have against a database of copyright samples to effectively generate a list of transclusion backlinks after-the-fact. All the problems I mentioned above are problems with YouTube Content ID, not Xanadu - there are plenty of publishers whose policy is "block", and it is their right to do that; making a fair use of content will trip the filters and you have to argue with YouTube to do what you are legally entitled to do, etc. It is entirely an engineer's view of copyright law, which is just laughably bad.

gumby 6y ago

It was clear that the WWW was a good idea but it clearly wouldn’t succeed because of the foolish decision not to have back links. But it might gain a bit of traction and make people receptive for the real thing. I attended more than one significant academic conference in the early 90s where this belief was uttered to general agreement. People had even already experienced broken links and yet couldn’t put 2 and 2 together. I also wanted bidirectional links even though I was a Lisp programmer! In case it’s not clear, one way links was an inspired decision. Another belief, in the latter part of the 90s, was that decent web search was basically impossible as someone would have to store a copy of the whole thing, which is clearly impossible.

kmeisthax 6y ago
How would you practically implement robust backlinks in a distributed hypertext system to begin with?
- DaiPlusPlus 6y ago
  Technically they exist in HTML+HTTP via the (mispelled) `Referer` header. It sucks that cross-site Referer sharing is seemingly being phased out by browsers in the name of user-privacy (as referer URIs do often contain PII), but there are more cynical explanations afoot which I won’t go into. Another approach is having a central link-repository that works as an overlay on the fully distributed web - this could be provided by search-engines. Another approach is a distributed link database. I’m sure some clever DHT system could be used to allow practically anyone to participate without needing nodes to hold a copy of the full database (a-la Bitcoin), or even one that allows directly-relevant nodes (e.g. a website’s own node) to stores only it’s own bi-di links and not waste resources on unaffiliated content. Of course, all of this assumes that spam, trolling, griefing, etc don’t exist :) For all the talk WWW gets about being a distributed system... it isn’t: it’s more of a federation of systems united only by their common use of HTML+HTTP and (hopefully) RESTful resource architecture. A true distributed WWW would be some horrible mix of IPFS, BitTorrent and Ethereum. I think that’s how Roko's Basilisk will come into existence...
  - 6y ago

dang 6y ago

If curious, past threads: Xanadu Basics – Visible Connection (2018) [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20258942 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20258942 - June 2019 (25 comments) “Xanadu Hypertext Documents” architecture and data structures, 2019 edition - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19745517 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19745517 - April 2019 (1 comment) Project Xanadu - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19710142 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19710142 - April 2019 (32 comments) Ted Nelson's Pre-Final Reply to “The Curse of Xanadu” by Gary Wolf / Gory Jackal - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19672373 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19672373 - April 2019 (1 comment) Getting to Xanadu - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18635123 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18635123 - Dec 2018 (55 comments) Xanadu - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15269827 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15269827 - Sept 2017 (86 comments) Ted Nelson presents a working prototype version of Xanadu - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12386339 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12386339 - Aug 2016 (1 comment) Roads to Xanadu - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10642143 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10642143 - Nov 2015 (6 comments) The Xanadu Parallel Universe - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10470068 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10470068 - Oct 2015 (2 comments) Xanadu: we have a working deliverable - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7849389 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7849389 - June 2014 (99 comments) The Curse of Xanadu (1995) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4160525 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4160525 - June 2012 (2 comments) The Curse of Xanadu (1995) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1583311 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1583311 - Aug 2010 (6 comments) How Xanadu Works: technical overview - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=962315 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=962315 - Nov 2009 (5 comments) The Xanadu Dream - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=876469 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=876469 - Oct 2009 (15 comments) The Curse of Xanadu - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=795155 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=795155 - Aug 2009 (18 comments) Others?

qwerty456127 6y ago

Isn't this something like Roam/Obsidian, just more complicated&academic to the point of unimplementability?

karlicoss 6y ago
An alternative (e.g. Nelson's) point of view would be that Roam/Obsidian is a dumbed down and crippled version of his vision. But yes, hard to deny the point about unimplementability

teddyh 6y ago

In 1988, Autodesk (makers of AutoCAD) was so impressed by the Xanadu project that they gave them financial backing. After four years, Autodesk gave up: > […] Come 1992, the “resources of Autodesk” were still funding “talent of the Xanadu team” which had not, as of that date, produced anything remotely like a production prototype—in fact, nothing as impressive as the 88.1x prototype which existed before Autodesk invested in Xanadu. On August 21, 1992 Autodesk decided to pull the plug and give its interest in Xanadu back to the Xanadudes. (Quoted from footnote linked from this page: https://www.fourmilab.ch/autofile/e5/chapter2_64.html https://www.fourmilab.ch/autofile/e5/chapter2_64.html)

mistrial9 6y ago
yeah, but I worked on a *nix workstation configured by Autodesk at that time, and the engineers that set it up casually mentioned that it had taken a month.. What that snippet says to me, plus the context at the time, was that is was deeply arcane to work on "servers" and that delays of weeks were common when "configuring" the thing. In fact, even booting hardware was a specialty, and a diversity of hardware existed that might surprise someone born in the 90s or later. I was sympathetic to the "Xanadudes" but also personally saw the sort of unrealizable side to their particular efforts. "Tilting at Windmills" seemed to be a fitting description.

egotripper 6y ago

I did not see this article directly linked in the comments: https://www.wired.com/1995/06/xanadu/ https://www.wired.com/1995/06/xanadu/

shp0ngle 6y ago

did anyone tried putting xanadu on a blockchain with ICO and all