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Interesting piece - I hope it gets finished. Ted Nelson's books Computer Lib / Dream Machines, and Literary Machines are interesting and unconventional, but ha

Interesting piece - I hope it gets finished. Ted Nelson's books Computer Lib / Dream Machines, and Literary Machines are interesting and unconventional, but hard to find now. As for Xanadu, the classic Wired aricle The Curse of Xanadu [1] is still well worth a read. I'm not sure his vision was something that would have ever succeeded, but he at least posited an alternative to what we have now. [1] https://www.wired.com/1995/06/xanadu/ https://www.wired.com/1995/06/xanadu/ Edit to add that I've used the term "rabid prototyping" a few times over the years, and skimming that wired article reminds me where I stole it from.

EdwardCoffin 3y ago
Nelson has termed The Curse of Xanadu a hatchet job. There is discussion of that article, including links to archived versions of Nelson's responses to it at the c2.com page about it [1]. After an initial period of thinking Xanadu was vapourware, then feeling like the article was an uncharitable hatchet-job, I'm back to thinking it was vapourware. Nelson's responses seemed nit-picky at best, and when I downloaded the prototype/demo they'd made available I simply could not get it to work. [1] https://wiki.c2.com/?TheCurseOfXanadu https://wiki.c2.com/?TheCurseOfXanadu
- kristopolous 3y ago
  I was personally building that demo and expressed these concerns at the time ten years ago. The other person on the project, who was like 17, convinced Ted that my, at the time, 20 years of software development somehow made me malicious and he asked me to not work on it. So he got what some sniping high school kid can make. Yes I'm still bitter about it. I don't make broken shit and that shit was broken. I still went to the demo/announcement at Chapman university (Woz was there, that was pretty cool) The reason Nelson's stuff hasn't gone anywhere is because he's a tyrant persuaded by fools and liars. I wish him the best regardless.
  - nonethewiser 3y ago
    Well that sounds like a major red flag
    - kristopolous 3y ago
      This isn't for lack of competent people with good intentions. The only times his ideas succeeded is when he wasn't on the project. Hypercard, WWW... His ideas were in the room but he was not. There's some deep lessons on how important therapy, interpersonal relationships and good management are there. This isn't to throw shade. Nobody remembers most brilliant inventors as successful CEOs because they usually aren't. It's a different skillset and you gotta know when to hand over the keys and to whom. It's not easy and I certainly don't profess expertise.
      - specialist 3y ago
        FWIW, Duff Kurland's post-mortem of Nelson & Xanadu at Autodesk jives with your analysis.
        jazzyjackson 3y ago
        In the spirit of xanadu, would you mind posting a link? In searching your keywords, I did come across a font of wisdom in the form of "The Autodesk File: Bits of History, Words of Experience" which contains some chapters on Xanadu and Autodesk's relationship and acquisition - which I've managed to be wholly unaware of despite being a xanadu enthusiast (in so far as buying a couple of Ted's books and watching his videos on youtube counts :) http://www.worldcolleges.info/sites/default/files/formpig_autodesk_file_bits_of_history_words_of_experience_walker.pdf http://www.worldcolleges.info/sites/default/files/formpig_au... (see ToC, Xanadu on page 416 and elsewhere)
        deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
        specialist 3y ago
        It was a personal conversation. No link, sorry. From memory, Kurland related that the Xanadu team did one or more complete rewrites, couldn't or wouldn't commit to releasing something (delays), and Autodesk finally lost faith/patience. Kurland's a great guy. He didn't name names or dog their effort. He was mostly disappointed, because he had also believed in the promise of Xanadu. But that's just my take.
  - specialist 3y ago
    > Yes I'm still bitter about it. It's hard not to be. Been there, been done like that. Sadly, I have all the financial and business sense of some zooplankton. I'd give a leg to go back in time for a do-over and the other leg to be smart like that.
  - cratermoon 3y ago
    > somehow made me malicious and he asked me to not work on it. Something like what you describe happened to me. Not a fun gig, I sympathize.
  - nateabele 3y ago
    For whatever it's worth to you, I don't think of myself as easily impressed. I saw Ted give that demo at a small conference around 10 years ago. I was impressed. Whatever part you played in that, well done, and thank you. I got to speak with him briefly afterwards, and to say that he had a chip on his shoulder would be putting it too strongly, but there was definitely some kind of an 'edge' there.
    - kristopolous 3y ago
      It was fine. There's a number of related projects that are all incredibly minor who had similar demos and somehow were also managed by similar personality types. I've worked with many people over the years but somehow they get their own special group. Sometimes you run into them at SigGraph, they're these emperors where their kingdom is their mind. They have those messy sprawling websites that read like Doc Brown's scrapbook. It's an archetype I feel certainly adjacent to and fearful of. Regardless, about 6 months ago I left my job trying to catch up on all the AI craze because I think that might be the missing piece in moving this class of projects to the next step. It's going slowly, motivation is hard and this is still kind of a moonshot. The information organization required to make these memex inspired thought navigational systems truly useful was fleeting, subjective, and labor intensive. AI can do that, pretty well actually, and in personal, subjective ways. VR and AR can as well and I explored that enough to conclude it's too complicated. You can certainly express the dimensionality needed and tune things accordingly but it's too complicated to be useful. There's a cognitive limit on the amount of dimensionality and complexity that most people can handle. There are certainly some brilliant people who don't seem bound by these limits but that's not the point here. It's about taking the information that usually only brilliant people have access to and expanding that so that merely average people like myself can gain competence in it as well. Chat bots are fine but that's not going to get you from 0 to say, abstract algebras, modern quantum physics, or field theory, which I strongly believe should be accessible to say, 40-60% of people motivated enough to learn it and I strongly believe it currently is not because of the cognitive limits I expressed above by the traditional linear instruction methods. Getting to the next paradigm is something more people should be working on Turning the Internet into a true learning machine needs more work and hopefully AI can help
nonethewiser 3y ago
The fact that he coined the term hypertext and we saw a far less powerful version than he envisioned released by someone else does make me feel like there may be some unrealized potential, but that’s just naive speculation. Im not actually familiar with Xanadu.
7thaccount 3y ago
The game "Kentucky Route Zero" has a chapter where you're in a cave with some crazy cave people doing computer research with antiquated hardware and it's called "Xanadu" lol. It took me awhile to catch the real world reference.

EdwardCoffin 3y ago

Nelson has termed The Curse of Xanadu a hatchet job. There is discussion of that article, including links to archived versions of Nelson's responses to it at the c2.com page about it [1]. After an initial period of thinking Xanadu was vapourware, then feeling like the article was an uncharitable hatchet-job, I'm back to thinking it was vapourware. Nelson's responses seemed nit-picky at best, and when I downloaded the prototype/demo they'd made available I simply could not get it to work. [1] https://wiki.c2.com/?TheCurseOfXanadu https://wiki.c2.com/?TheCurseOfXanadu

kristopolous 3y ago
I was personally building that demo and expressed these concerns at the time ten years ago. The other person on the project, who was like 17, convinced Ted that my, at the time, 20 years of software development somehow made me malicious and he asked me to not work on it. So he got what some sniping high school kid can make. Yes I'm still bitter about it. I don't make broken shit and that shit was broken. I still went to the demo/announcement at Chapman university (Woz was there, that was pretty cool) The reason Nelson's stuff hasn't gone anywhere is because he's a tyrant persuaded by fools and liars. I wish him the best regardless.
- nonethewiser 3y ago
  Well that sounds like a major red flag
  - kristopolous 3y ago
    This isn't for lack of competent people with good intentions. The only times his ideas succeeded is when he wasn't on the project. Hypercard, WWW... His ideas were in the room but he was not. There's some deep lessons on how important therapy, interpersonal relationships and good management are there. This isn't to throw shade. Nobody remembers most brilliant inventors as successful CEOs because they usually aren't. It's a different skillset and you gotta know when to hand over the keys and to whom. It's not easy and I certainly don't profess expertise.
    - specialist 3y ago
      FWIW, Duff Kurland's post-mortem of Nelson & Xanadu at Autodesk jives with your analysis.
      - jazzyjackson 3y ago
        In the spirit of xanadu, would you mind posting a link? In searching your keywords, I did come across a font of wisdom in the form of "The Autodesk File: Bits of History, Words of Experience" which contains some chapters on Xanadu and Autodesk's relationship and acquisition - which I've managed to be wholly unaware of despite being a xanadu enthusiast (in so far as buying a couple of Ted's books and watching his videos on youtube counts :) http://www.worldcolleges.info/sites/default/files/formpig_autodesk_file_bits_of_history_words_of_experience_walker.pdf http://www.worldcolleges.info/sites/default/files/formpig_au... (see ToC, Xanadu on page 416 and elsewhere)
        deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
        specialist 3y ago
        It was a personal conversation. No link, sorry. From memory, Kurland related that the Xanadu team did one or more complete rewrites, couldn't or wouldn't commit to releasing something (delays), and Autodesk finally lost faith/patience. Kurland's a great guy. He didn't name names or dog their effort. He was mostly disappointed, because he had also believed in the promise of Xanadu. But that's just my take.
- specialist 3y ago
  > Yes I'm still bitter about it. It's hard not to be. Been there, been done like that. Sadly, I have all the financial and business sense of some zooplankton. I'd give a leg to go back in time for a do-over and the other leg to be smart like that.
- cratermoon 3y ago
  > somehow made me malicious and he asked me to not work on it. Something like what you describe happened to me. Not a fun gig, I sympathize.
- nateabele 3y ago
  For whatever it's worth to you, I don't think of myself as easily impressed. I saw Ted give that demo at a small conference around 10 years ago. I was impressed. Whatever part you played in that, well done, and thank you. I got to speak with him briefly afterwards, and to say that he had a chip on his shoulder would be putting it too strongly, but there was definitely some kind of an 'edge' there.
  - kristopolous 3y ago
    It was fine. There's a number of related projects that are all incredibly minor who had similar demos and somehow were also managed by similar personality types. I've worked with many people over the years but somehow they get their own special group. Sometimes you run into them at SigGraph, they're these emperors where their kingdom is their mind. They have those messy sprawling websites that read like Doc Brown's scrapbook. It's an archetype I feel certainly adjacent to and fearful of. Regardless, about 6 months ago I left my job trying to catch up on all the AI craze because I think that might be the missing piece in moving this class of projects to the next step. It's going slowly, motivation is hard and this is still kind of a moonshot. The information organization required to make these memex inspired thought navigational systems truly useful was fleeting, subjective, and labor intensive. AI can do that, pretty well actually, and in personal, subjective ways. VR and AR can as well and I explored that enough to conclude it's too complicated. You can certainly express the dimensionality needed and tune things accordingly but it's too complicated to be useful. There's a cognitive limit on the amount of dimensionality and complexity that most people can handle. There are certainly some brilliant people who don't seem bound by these limits but that's not the point here. It's about taking the information that usually only brilliant people have access to and expanding that so that merely average people like myself can gain competence in it as well. Chat bots are fine but that's not going to get you from 0 to say, abstract algebras, modern quantum physics, or field theory, which I strongly believe should be accessible to say, 40-60% of people motivated enough to learn it and I strongly believe it currently is not because of the cognitive limits I expressed above by the traditional linear instruction methods. Getting to the next paradigm is something more people should be working on Turning the Internet into a true learning machine needs more work and hopefully AI can help

nonethewiser 3y ago

The fact that he coined the term hypertext and we saw a far less powerful version than he envisioned released by someone else does make me feel like there may be some unrealized potential, but that’s just naive speculation. Im not actually familiar with Xanadu.

7thaccount 3y ago

The game "Kentucky Route Zero" has a chapter where you're in a cave with some crazy cave people doing computer research with antiquated hardware and it's called "Xanadu" lol. It took me awhile to catch the real world reference.