Project Xanadu® is the original hypertext project — the brainchild of Ted Nelson, and the result of careful and passionate work by innumerable clever people over the course of nearly sixty years. Because of the length of its development period, the project has spawned and used many ideas of varying importance, and particularly important ideas have had many names. Because its history spans several eras of computing, ideas spawned by the project that were once considered radical have become commonplace and other ideas that were once commonplace have become forgotten and become radical again. Over this time, most documentation available to the public has been written by Ted, and intended for a non-technical or semi-technical audience.
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Ted Nelson Thread on Hacker News
.. It’s easy to dismiss Ted Nelson as some old crazy man who spent his life selling snake oil when you’re behind your computer, but the reality of it is that he contributed a lot to the field and is deeply respected amongst his peers. He was a close friend of Engelbart, his work valued by his contemporaries, and there’s a reason for which he was invited at the Homebrew Computer Club reunion a few months ago. Nelson’s work gives us an insight on what computing could have looked like, in some weird parallel world.
He is controversial, perhaps; and some of his ideas/claims may be unpractical/unrealistic/etc. – but ignoring and dismissing him only sends the message that you’re not as much of an expert as your rhetoric attempts to make you out to be.
.. Alas, this believer in transclusion also deeply feels it’s important that authors need to be paid, himself included. Perhaps he’d have a better chance to impact history in a meaningful way if he opted to give away for free the works making that case? Very few will have a chance to be exposed to the ideas Ted Nelson promotes: the range of books you suggest shows the impossibility of ever getting a comprehensive look into his view.
.. More to the point, if he’d opted to open source the code.
In Computer Lib/Dream Machines, one of the systems Nelson describes and lauds is Calvin Mooers’s TRAC macro language. Mooers took his IP seriously and defended it seriously. You can read his argument in favor of copyright to protect software in a Computing Surveys issue from some decades ago. Mooers protected TRAC right into oblivion–if even 1% of those who read HN have ever heard of it, I’ll be amazed.
..There’s an open source code dump of two versions on udanax.xanadu.com. “Xanadu Gold” is the most insane codebase I’ve ever seen — implemented in Smalltalk but intended for automatic translation to C++.
.. A friend of mine says Xanadu got quite a bit further, but failed hard at the end because they’d not bothered to do and keep viable the total end to end use case. Specially, to actually interact with the system and display a document was so hard and cumbersome it never had a chance of being adopted (by pretty much anyone, let alone widely), whatever other problems there might have been with the project.
Xanadu People
The founder:
Theodor Holm Nelson
Early contributors:
- William Barus
- Cal Daniels
- Dave Denniston
- Dan Prener
- John V. E. Ridgway
- Andrew J. Singer
The original Xanadu development team:
- Ted Nelson
- Roger Gregory
- Mark Miller
- Stuart Greene
- Roland King
- Eric Hill
- Eric Dean Tribble
- Ravi Pandya
The current Xanadu Operating Company, Inc:
- Ted Nelson
- Roger Gregory
- Kathleen Diohep
- H. Keith Henson
- Chris Peterson
The current Project Xanadu (the Ted Nelson T.E.A.M.):
- Ted Nelson
<ted@xanadu.net>
- Ed Harter
<ed@xanadu.net>
- Andrew Pam
<andrew@xanadu.net>
- Marlene Mallicoat
<marlene@xanadu.net>
Xanadu Australia:
- Andrew Pam
<xanni@xanadu.com.au>
- Katherine Phelps
<muse@xanadu.com.au>
Keio University students:
- Yoshihide CHUBACHI
- Yuki ISHII
- Tomoko TANIZAKI
Others who have assisted:
- Steve André
- Glen Babecki
- Tom Barnard
- Roz Barnett
- Bunty Barus
- Carl Barus
- Peter Barus
- Bob Bickford
- Greta Bickford
- Kayla Block
- Alan Boyd
- Jacob Brackman
- Sandy Brown
- James Burke
- Mike Butler
- Stella Calvert
- D.J. Cone
- Stanley Cooke
- John Copeland
- Mark Crandall
- Pat Crepeau
- Hugh Daniel
- Elizabeth Davenport
- Richard deVore
- Tom Dinnella
- Steve Ditlea
- Mark-Jason Dominus
- Steve Dompier
- K. Eric Drexler
- Rich Dutcher
- Esther Dyson
- Steve Eberbach
- Doug Englebart
- Samuel Latt Epstein
- Jonathan Fagin
- Anne Fallon
- Ian Feldman
- Robert W. Fiddler
- Harry Garland
- Graham Gibbard
- Jock Gill
- Edward Tesla Gregory
- Anna Gruda
- Eric Gullichsen
- Paul Gumerman
- Scott Guthery
- Robert Haavind
- Sue Hardy
- Sean Harmon
- Charles S. Harris
- Judith Harris
- Bevier Hasbrouck
- Dennis Hayes
- Dick Heiser
- Ben Hemming
- Richard Hill
- Sheila Hill
- Danny Hillis
- Starr Roxanne Hiltz
- Emil Hirsch
- Mike Hirsch
- Peter Hirschberg
- Jean Parke Holm
- Theodor Holm
- Yousuke IGARASHI
- Catherine Ikam
- Peter Z. Ingerman
- Rob Jellinghaus
- Andrew Johnson
- Herb Johnson
- William Jovanovich
- Mitch Kapor
- Amy Karash
- Alan Kay
- Skip King
- Art Kleiner
- Gene Klotz
- Eliot Klugman
- Nat Kuhn
- Ron Lachman
- Timothy Leary
- Michael Lecuyer
- Debra Levin
- Bob Levine
- Ginny Levine
- John R. Levine
- Margy Levine
- Faye Levine
- Ann Lewin
- Mary Jo Lewis
- A. Sheldon Liederkranz
- Joseph I. Lipson
- Leon Loeb
- Jeffrey Lord
- Bob Lovell
- Sue Lovell
- John Mauchly
- Mike McClary
- Laura McLaughlin
- Sheila McKenzie
- Harry Mendell
- Ann Miller
- David C. Miller
- Margaret Minsky
- Marvin Minsky
- Calvin Mooers
- Chip Morningstar
- Cameron Moseley
- Jim Moses
- Erika Muhlenberg
- Toshifumi MURATA
- Anne Nadreau
- Kenji NAEMURA
- Shu NAKAMAE
- Maria Nekam
- Erik Nelson
- John Nelson
- Peter Nelson
- Kazuhiko NISHII
- Janie Noble
- Rebekah Oberin
- Hajime OHIWA
- Kiyoki OOKUBO
- Tim Oren
- Jay Osako
- Rich Pasco
- Gail Pergamit
- Jan Peugh
- Art Pollard
- Jonathan Vos Post
- Bob Radford
- Laura Raettig
- Eric S. Raymond
- Naomi Reynolds
- Suzanne Ropiequet
- Bill Richard
- Nobuo SAITO
- Phil Salin
- Lauren Sarno
- Dennis Schmidt
- Jonathan Schmidt
- Steve Senzig
<senzig@gmail.com>
- Jonathan Shapiro
- Tsutomu SHIMOMURA
- Charlie Smith
- Dan Smith
- Nancy Smith
- Olga Smyth
- Jean-Pierre Soisson
- Richard M. Stallman
- Barbara Staudt
- Dave Staudt
- Deborah Stone
- L. Joseph Stone
- Johan Strandberg
- Ull Strandberg
- Roy Stringer
- Michael Swaine
- Geo Swan
- Paul Terrell
- Les Tietz
- Murray Turoff
- Ken’ichi UNNAI
- Yoko UJIKE
- Peter Vengella
- John Verity
- Bob Wallace
- Brian Wanty
- Lauren Wedeles
- Mike Westgate
- Jim Whitehead
- Gordon Whiting
- Steve Witham
- David Woodcock
- Maggie Woodcock
- Yukihiko YOSHIDA
- Phil Zimmerman
- Leor Zolman