Project Xanadu was the first
hypertextHypertext is text, displayed on a computer, with references to other text that the reader can immediately access, usually by a mouse click or keypress sequence. Apart from running text, hypertext may contain tables, images and other presentational devices...
project, founded in 1960 by
Ted NelsonTheodor Holm Nelson is an American sociologist, philosopher, and pioneer of information technology. He coined the term "hypertext" in 1963 and published it in 1965. He also is credited with first use of the words hypermedia, transclusion, virtuality, intertwingularity and teledildonics...
. Administrators of Project Xanadu now contrast it with both paper and the World Wide Web, saying "Today's popular software simulates paper. The World Wide Web (another imitation of paper) trivialises our original hypertext model with one-way ever-breaking links and no management of version or contents."
WiredWired is a full-color monthly American magazine and on-line periodical, published since March 1993, that reports on how technology affects culture, the economy, and politics...
magazine called it the "longest-running
vaporwareVaporware is a term used to describe a product, usually software, that has been announced by a developer during or before its development and, therefore, may never actually be released...
story in the history of the computer industry".
Project Xanadu was the first
hypertextHypertext is text, displayed on a computer, with references to other text that the reader can immediately access, usually by a mouse click or keypress sequence. Apart from running text, hypertext may contain tables, images and other presentational devices...
project, founded in 1960 by
Ted NelsonTheodor Holm Nelson is an American sociologist, philosopher, and pioneer of information technology. He coined the term "hypertext" in 1963 and published it in 1965. He also is credited with first use of the words hypermedia, transclusion, virtuality, intertwingularity and teledildonics...
. Administrators of Project Xanadu now contrast it with both paper and the World Wide Web, saying "Today's popular software simulates paper. The World Wide Web (another imitation of paper) trivialises our original hypertext model with one-way ever-breaking links and no management of version or contents."
WiredWired is a full-color monthly American magazine and on-line periodical, published since March 1993, that reports on how technology affects culture, the economy, and politics...
magazine called it the "longest-running
vaporwareVaporware is a term used to describe a product, usually software, that has been announced by a developer during or before its development and, therefore, may never actually be released...
story in the history of the computer industry". The first attempt at implementation began in 1960, but it wasn't until 1998 that an implementation (albeit incomplete) was released.
History
During his first year as a graduate student at Harvard, Nelson began implementing the system which contained the basic outline of what would become Project Xanadu: a word processor capable of storing multiple versions, and displaying the differences between these versions. Though he did not complete this implementation, a mockup of the system proved sufficient to inspire interest in others.
On top of this basic idea, Nelson wanted to facilitate nonsequential writing, in which the reader could choose his or her own path through an electronic document. He built upon this idea in a paper to the
ACMThe Association for Computing Machinery, or ACM, is a learned society for computing. It was founded in 1947 as the world's first scientific and educational computing society. Its membership is more than 92,000 as of 2009...
in 1965, calling the new idea "zippered lists". These zippered lists would allow compound documents to be formed from pieces of other documents, a concept named
transclusionIn computer science, transclusion is the inclusion of part of a document into another document by reference.For example, an article about a country might include a chart or a paragraph describing that country's agricultural exports from a different article about agriculture...
. In 1967, while working for
Harcourt, BraceHarcourt Trade Publishers was a U.S. publishing firm with a long history of publishing fiction and nonfiction for children and adults. In 2007, the company was sold by Reed Elsevier to Houghton Mifflin Riverdeep Group. The merged company is now named Houghton Mifflin Harcourt...
he named his project
XanaduXanadu, or more accurately Shàngdū , was the summer capital of Kublai Khan's Yuan Dynasty in China, after he decided to move the capital of the Yuan Dynasty to Dadu, present-day Beijing. The city was located in what is now called Inner Mongolia, north of Beijing, about northwest of the modern...
, in honour of the poem "
Kubla Khan"Kubla Khan; or, A Vision in a Dream: A Fragment" is a poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, which takes its title from the Mongol and Chinese emperor Kublai Khan of the Yuan Dynasty. Coleridge claimed he wrote the poem in the autumn of 1797 at a farmhouse near Exmoor, England, but it may have been...
" by
Samuel Taylor ColeridgeSamuel Taylor Coleridge was an English poet, Romantic, literary critic and philosopher who, with his friend William Wordsworth, was one of the founders of the Romantic Movement in England and one of the Lake Poets...
.
Ted Nelson published his ideas in his 1974 book
Computer Lib/Dream Machines and the 1981
Literary MachinesLiterary Machines is a book first published in 1980 by Ted Nelson, and republished 9 times by 1993. It offers an extensive overview of Nelson's term "hypertext" as well as Nelson's Project Xanadu...
.
Computer Lib/Dream Machines is written in a non-sequential fashion: it is a compilation of Nelson's thoughts about computing, among other topics, in no particular order. It contains two books, printed back to back, to be flipped between.
Computer Lib contains Nelson's thoughts on topics which angered him,
Dream Machines discusses his hopes for the potential of computers to assist the arts.
In 1972, Cal Daniels completed the first demonstration version of the Xanadu software on a computer Nelson had rented for the purpose, though Nelson soon ran out of money. In 1974, with the advent of computer networking, Nelson refined his thoughts about Xanadu into a centralised source of information, calling it a "
docuverseDocuverse is a global distributed electronic library of interconnected documents, in other words a global metadocument. The term was coined by Ted Nelson in 1974, as a concept related to the Project Xanadu, and it was an actual depiction of what would later be the World Wide Web.-External links:**...
".
In the summer of 1979, Nelson led the latest group of his followers,
Roger GregoryRoger Everett Gregory is a US computer programmer, technologist and scientist. Gregory's work in project Xanadu made him one of earliest pioneers of hypertext technology. Gregory is also co-designer of a rotary rocket engine design based on the posthumous patents of Robert Goddard Roger Everett...
,
Mark MillerMark S. Miller is an American computer scientist. He is known for his work as one of the participants in the 1979 hypertext project known as Project Xanadu; for inventing Miller Columns; as the co-creator of the of Market-based distributed secure computing; and the open-source coordinator of the...
and Stuart Greene, to
SwarthmoreSwarthmore is a borough in Delaware County, Pennsylvania, United States. Swarthmore was originally named Westdale in honor of noted painter Benjamin West, who was one of the early residents of the town. The name was changed to Swarthmore after the establishment of Swarthmore College...
. In a house rented by Greene, they hashed out their ideas for Xanadu; but at the end of the summer the group went their separate ways. Miller and Gregory created an addressing system based on
transfinite numberTransfinite numbers are cardinal numbers or ordinal numbers that are larger than all finite numbers, yet not necessarily absolutely infinite. The term transfinite was coined by Georg Cantor, who wished to avoid some of the implications of the word infinite in connection with these objects, which...
s which they called tumblers, which allowed any part of a file to be referenced.
The group continued their work, almost to the point of bankruptcy. In 1983, however, Nelson met John Walker, founder of
AutodeskAutodesk, Inc. is an American multinational corporation that focuses on 2D and 3D design software for use in architecture, engineering and building construction, manufacturing, and media and entertainment. Autodesk was founded in 1982 by John Walker, a coauthor of early versions of the company's...
, at a conference for the people mentioned in
Steven LevySteven Levy is an American journalist who has written several books on computers, technology, cryptography, the Internet, cybersecurity, and privacy.-Career:...
's
HackersHackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution is a book by Steven Levy about hacker culture. It was published in 1984 in Garden City, New York by Anchor Press/Doubleday...
, and the group started working on Xanadu with Autodesk's financial backing.
According to economist
Robin HansonRobin Hanson is an associate professor of economics at George Mason University. He is known as an expert on idea futures, markets and was involved in the creation of the Foresight Exchange and DARPA's FutureMAP project...
, in 1990 the first known corporate
prediction marketPrediction markets are speculative markets created for the purpose of making predictions...
was used at Xanadu. Employees and consultants used it for example to bet on the
cold fusionCold fusion refers to a proposed nuclear fusion process of unknown mechanism offered to explain a group of disputed experimental results first reported by electrochemists Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons...
controversy at the time.
While at Autodesk, the group, lead by Gregory, completed a version of the software, written in the
C programming languageC is a general-purpose computer programming language developed in 1972 by Dennis Ritchie at the Bell Telephone Laboratories for use with the Unix operating system....
, though the software didn't work as well as they wanted. However, this version of Xanadu was successfully demonstrated at the Hackers Conference and generated considerable interest. Then a newer group of programmers, hired from
Xerox PARCPARC , formerly Xerox PARC, is a research and development company in Palo Alto, California with a distinguished reputation for its contributions to information technology....
, used the problems with this software as justification to
rewriteA rewrite in computer programming is the act or result of re-implementing a large portion of existing functionality without re-use of its source code. When the rewrite is not using existing code at all, it is common to speak of a rewrite from scratch...
the software in
SmalltalkSmalltalk is an object-oriented, dynamically typed, reflective programming language. Smalltalk was created as the language to underpin the "new world" of computing exemplified by "human–computer symbiosis." It was designed and created in part for educational use, more so for constructionist...
. This effectively split the group into two factions, and the decision to rewrite put a deadline imposed by Autodesk out of the team's reach. In August 1992, Autodesk divested the Xanadu group, which became the Xanadu Operating Company, which struggled due to internal conflicts and lack of investment.
Charles S. Smith, the founder of a company called
MemexThe memex is the name given by Vannevar Bush to the theoretical proto-hypertext computer system he proposed in his 1945 The Atlantic Monthly article As We May Think...
(the name of the hypertext system designed by
Vannevar BushVannevar Bush was an American engineer and science administrator known for his work on analog computing, his political role in the development of the atomic bomb, and the idea of the memex, an adjustable microfilm-viewer which is somewhat analogous to the World Wide Web.Bush was a well-known...
), hired many of the Xanadu programmers and licensed the Xanadu technology, though Memex soon faced financial difficulties, and the then-unpaid programmers left, taking the computers with them. (The programmers were eventually paid.) At around this time,
Tim Berners-LeeSir Timothy John "Tim" Berners-Lee, OM, KBE, FRS, FREng, FRSA , is a British engineer and computer scientist and MIT professor credited with inventing the World Wide Web, making the first proposal for it in March 1989...
was developing the
World Wide WebThe World Wide Web is a system of interlinked hypertext documents accessed via the Internet. With a web browser, one can view Web pages that may contain text, images, videos, and other multimedia and navigate between them using hyperlinks...
.
In 1998, Nelson released the source code to Xanadu as Project Udanax, in the hope that the techniques and algorithms used could help to overturn some
software patentSoftware patent does not have a universally accepted definition. One definition suggested by the Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure is that a software patent is a "patent on any performance of a computer realised by means of a computer program".
[In 2005, the European...]
s.
In 2007, Project Xanadu released
XanaduSpace 1.0.
Original 17 rules
- Every Xanadu server is uniquely and securely identified.
- Every Xanadu server can be operated independently or in a network.
- Every user is uniquely and securely identified.
- Every user can search, retrieve, create and store documents.
- Every document can consist of any number of parts each of which may be of any data type.
- Every document can contain links of any type including virtual copies ("transclusions") to any other document in the system accessible to its owner.
- Links are visible and can be followed from all endpoints.
- Permission to link to a document is explicitly granted by the act of publication.
- Every document can contain a royalty mechanism at any desired degree of granularity to ensure payment on any portion accessed, including virtual copies ("transclusions"
In computer science, transclusion is the inclusion of part of a document into another document by reference.For example, an article about a country might include a chart or a paragraph describing that country's agricultural exports from a different article about agriculture...
) of all or part of the document.
- Every document is uniquely and securely identified.
- Every document can have secure access controls.
- Every document can be rapidly searched, stored and retrieved without user knowledge of where it is physically stored.
- Every document is automatically moved to physical storage appropriate to its frequency of access from any given location.
- Every document is automatically stored redundantly to maintain availability even in case of a disaster.
- Every Xanadu service provider can charge their users at any rate they choose for the storage, retrieval and publishing of documents.
- Every transaction is secure and auditable only by the parties to that transaction.
- The Xanadu client-server communication protocol is an openly published standard. Third-party software development and integration is encouraged.
See also
- Enfilade (Xanadu)
Enfilades are a class of tree data structures used in Project Xanadu designs of the 1970s and 1980s. Enfilades allow quick editing, versioning, retrieval and inter-comparison operations in a large, cross-linked hypertext database...
- Hypertext
Hypertext is text, displayed on a computer, with references to other text that the reader can immediately access, usually by a mouse click or keypress sequence. Apart from running text, hypertext may contain tables, images and other presentational devices...
- Hypermedia
Hypermedia is used as a logical extension of the term hypertext in which graphics, audio, video, plain text and hyperlinks intertwine to create a generally non-linear medium of information.This contrasts with the broader term multimedia, which may be used to describe non-interactive linear...
- Memex
The memex is the name given by Vannevar Bush to the theoretical proto-hypertext computer system he proposed in his 1945 The Atlantic Monthly article As We May Think...
- ENQUIRE
ENQUIRE was an early software project written in the second half of 1980 by Tim Berners-Lee, who went on to create the World Wide Web in 1989. ENQUIRE had some of the same ideas as the Web and the Semantic Web but was different in several important ways. One of them was that it was not supposed to...
- Interpedia
Interpedia was the name given to the first proposals for an Internet encyclopedia which would allow anyone to contribute by writing articles and submitting them to the central catalog of all Interpedia pages....
- American Information Exchange
The American Information Exchange , was a platform for the exchange of information, ideas, and certain kinds of intellectual work product, created by economist and futurist Phil Salin in the 1980s....
External links