Project Xanadu ( ) was the first

hypertext Hypertext is E-text, text displayed on a computer display or other electronic devices with references (hyperlinks) to other text that the reader can immediately access. Hypertext documents are interconnected by hyperlinks, which are typic ...

project, founded in 1960 by

Ted Nelson Theodor Holm Nelson (born June 17, 1937) is an American pioneer of information technology, philosopher, and sociologist. He coined the terms ''hypertext'' and ''hypermedia'' in 1963 and published them in 1965. According to his 1997 ''Forbes'' p ...

. Administrators of Project Xanadu have declared it superior to the

World Wide Web The World Wide Web (WWW or simply the Web) is an information system that enables Content (media), content sharing over the Internet through user-friendly ways meant to appeal to users beyond Information technology, IT specialists and hobbyis ...

, with the mission statement: "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." ''

Wired Wired may refer to: Arts, entertainment, and media Music * ''Wired'' (Jeff Beck album), 1976 * ''Wired'' (Hugh Cornwell album), 1993 * ''Wired'' (Mallory Knox album), 2017 * "Wired", a song by Prism from their album '' Beat Street'' * "Wired ...

'' magazine published an article entitled "The Curse of Xanadu", calling Project Xanadu "the longest-running

vaporware In the computer industry, vaporware (or vapourware) is a product, typically computer Computer hardware, hardware or software, that is announced to the general public but is late, never actually manufactured, or officially canceled. Use of the w ...

story in the history of the computer industry"., archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20151026021059/https://www.wired.com/1995/06/xanadu/, archive-date=October 26, 2015, url-status=live The first attempt at implementation began in 1960, but it was not until 1998 that an incomplete implementation was released. A version described as "a working

deliverable A deliverable is a tangible or intangible good or service produced as a result of a project that is intended to be delivered to a customer (either internal or external). A deliverable could be a report, a document, a software product, a server upgr ...

", OpenXanadu, was made available in 2014.

History

Nelson's vision was for a "digital repository scheme for world-wide electronic publishing". Nelson states that the idea began in 1960, when he was a student at

Harvard University Harvard University is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Founded in 1636 and named for its first benefactor, the History of the Puritans in North America, Puritan clergyma ...

. He proposed a machine-language program which would store and display documents, together with the ability to perform edits. This was different from a

word processor A word processor (WP) is a device or computer program that provides for input, editing, formatting, and output of text, often with some additional features. Early word processors were stand-alone devices dedicated to the function, but current word ...

(which had not been invented yet) in that the functionality would have included visual comparisons of different versions of the document, a concept Nelson would later call "intercomparison". On top of this basic idea, Nelson wanted to facilitate nonsequential writing, in which the reader could choose their own path through an electronic document. He built upon this idea in a paper to the

Association for Computing Machinery The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) is a US-based international learned society for computing. It was founded in 1947 and is the world's largest scientific and educational computing society. The ACM is a non-profit professional membe ...

(ACM) 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

transclusion In computer science, transclusion is the inclusion of part or all of an electronic document into one or more other documents by reference via hypertext. Transclusion is usually performed when the referencing document is displayed, and is norma ...

. In 1967, while working for

Harcourt, Brace Harcourt () was an American publishing firm with a long history of publishing fiction and nonfiction for adults and children. It was known at different stages in its history as Harcourt Brace, & Co. and Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. From 1919 to 1 ...

, he named his project Xanadu, in honor of the poem " Kubla Khan" by

Samuel Taylor Coleridge Samuel Taylor Coleridge ( ; 21 October 177225 July 1834) was an English poet, literary critic, philosopher, and theologian who was a founder of the Romantic Movement in England and a member of the Lake Poets with his friend William Wordsworth ...

. Nelson's talk at the ACM predicted many of the features of today's hypertext systems, but at the time, his ideas had little impact. Though researchers were intrigued by his ideas, Nelson lacked the technical knowledge to demonstrate that the ideas could be implemented.

1970s

Ted Nelson published his ideas in his 1974 book '' Computer Lib/Dream Machines'' and the 1981 '' Literary Machines''. ''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 that angered him, while ''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 centralized source of information, calling it a " docuverse". In the summer of 1979, Nelson led the latest group of his followers, Roger Gregory, Mark S. Miller and Stuart Greene, to Swarthmore, Pennsylvania. 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 number In mathematics, transfinite numbers or infinite numbers are numbers that are " infinite" in the sense that they are larger than all finite numbers. These include the transfinite cardinals, which are cardinal numbers used to quantify the size of i ...

s that they called tumblers, which allowed any part of a file to be referenced.

1980s

The group continued their work, almost to the point of bankruptcy. In 1983, however, Nelson met John Walker, founder of

Autodesk Autodesk, Inc. is an American multinational software corporation that provides software products and services for the architecture, engineering, construction, manufacturing, media, education, and entertainment industries. Autodesk is headquarte ...

, at The Hackers Conference, a conference originally for the people mentioned in

Steven Levy Steven Levy (born 1951) is an American journalist and editor at large for '' Wired'' who has written extensively for publications on computers, technology, cryptography, the internet, cybersecurity, and privacy. He is the author of the 1984 boo ...

's '' Hackers'', and the group started working on Xanadu with Autodesk's financial backing. According to economist Robin Hanson, in 1990 the first known corporate

prediction market Prediction markets, also known as betting markets, information markets, decision markets, idea futures or event derivatives, are open markets that enable the prediction of specific outcomes using financial incentives. They are exchange-traded mar ...

was used at Xanadu. Employees and consultants used it for example to bet on the

cold fusion Cold fusion is a hypothesized type of nuclear reaction that would occur at, or near, room temperature. It would contrast starkly with the nuclear fusion, "hot" fusion that is known to take place naturally within Main sequence, stars and artific ...

controversy at the time. While at Autodesk, the group, led by Gregory, completed a version of the software, written in the

C programming language C (''pronounced'' '' – like the letter c'') is a general-purpose programming language. It was created in the 1970s by Dennis Ritchie and remains very widely used and influential. By design, C's features cleanly reflect the capabilities of ...

, though the software did not work the way 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 PARC, used the problems with this software as justification to rewrite the software in

Smalltalk Smalltalk is a purely object oriented programming language (OOP) that was originally created in the 1970s for educational use, specifically for constructionist learning, but later found use in business. It was created at Xerox PARC by Learni ...

. 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 and struggled due to internal conflicts and lack of investment. Charles S. Smith, the founder of a company called

Memex A memex (from "memory expansion") is a hypothetical electromechanical device for interacting with microform documents and described in Vannevar Bush's 1945 article " As We May Think". Bush envisioned the memex as a device in which individuals w ...

(named after a hypertext system proposed by

Vannevar Bush Vannevar Bush ( ; March 11, 1890 – June 28, 1974) was an American engineer, inventor and science administrator, who during World War II, World War II headed the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD), through which almo ...

), hired many of the Xanadu programmers (including lead architects Mark S. Miller, Dean Tribble and Ravi Pandya) 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-Lee Sir Timothy John Berners-Lee (born 8 June 1955), also known as TimBL, is an English computer scientist best known as the inventor of the World Wide Web, the HTML markup language, the URL system, and HTTP. He is a professorial research fellow a ...

was developing the

. When the Web began to see large growth that Xanadu did not, Nelson's team grew defensive in the supposed rivalry that was emerging that they were losing. The 1995 ''Wired'' Magazine article "The Curse of Xanadu" provoked a harsh rebuttal from Nelson, but contention largely faded as the Web dominated Xanadu.

1990s

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 patent A software patent is a patent on a piece of software, such as a computer program, library, user interface, or algorithm. The validity of these patents can be difficult to evaluate, as software is often at once a product of engineering, something ...

2000s

In 2007, Project Xanadu released XanaduSpace 1.0.

2010s

A version described as "a working deliverable", OpenXanadu, was made available on the

in 2014. It is called open because "you can see all the parts", but the site stated that it was "not yet open source". On the site, the creators claim that

stole their idea, and that the World Wide Web is a "bizarre structure created by arbitrary initiatives of varied people and it has a terrible programming language" and that Web security is a "complex maze". They go on to say that Hypertext is designed to be paper, and that the World Wide Web allows nothing more than dead links to other dead pages. In 2016, Ted Nelson was interviewed by

Werner Herzog Werner Herzog (; né Stipetić; born 5 September 1942) is a German filmmaker, actor, opera director, and author. Regarded as a pioneer of New German Cinema, his films often feature ambitious protagonists with impossible dreams, people with unusu ...

in his documentary, '' Lo and Behold, Reveries of the Connected World''. "By some, he was labeled insane for clinging on; to us, you appear to be the only one who is clinically sane", Herzog said. Nelson was delighted by the praise. "No one has ever said that before!" said Nelson. "Usually I hear the opposite."

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 RETRIEVE is a database management system (DBMS) offered on Tymshare's systems starting in August 1971. It was written in Tymshare's own FORTRAN, SUPER FORTRAN on the SDS 940. It offered basic single-file, non-relational database, relational databas ...

, 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") of all or part of the document. # Every document is uniquely and securely identified. # Every document can have secure

access control In physical security and information security, access control (AC) is the action of deciding whether a subject should be granted or denied access to an object (for example, a place or a resource). The act of ''accessing'' may mean consuming ...

s. # 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.Xanadu FAQ
What requirements do Xanadu systems aim to meet?
April 12, 2002 by Andrew Pam

Tumbler

In the design of the Xanadu computer system, a tumbler is an address of any range of content or link or a set of ranges or links. According to Gary Wolf in ''

'', the idea of tumblers was that "the address would not only point the reader to the correct machine, it would also indicate the author of the document, the version of the document, the correct span of bytes, and the links associated with these bytes." Tumblers were created by Roger Gregory and Mark Miller. The idea behind tumblers comes from

References

External links

''The Magical Place of Literary Memory: Xanadu''
i
Screening the Past
, July 2005 by Belinda Barnet
Wired feature on Nelson and Xanadu
*

ttps://web.archive.org/web/20001101230424/http://www2.educ.ksu.edu/Faculty/McGrathD/Fall99/NelsonLtr.htm Full text of Ted Nelson's comment*
''Errors in "The Curse of Xanadu"'' by Theodor Holm Nelson, Project Xanadu
*
Xanadu Australia
{snd an active site *
Xanadu Products Due Next Year
" by Jeff Merron. BIX online news report from the West Coast Computer Faire, 1988
Ted Nelson Possiplex Internet Archive book reading video

Design Document from 1984 Content management systems Ted Nelson Vaporware Hypertext Computer-related introductions in 1960 Software projects