Project Xanadu

Founded 1960 * The Original Hypertext Project

The computer world is not just technicality and razzle-dazzle. It is a continual war over software politics and paradigms. With ideas which are still radical, WE FIGHT ON.

We hope for vindication, the last laugh, and recognition as an additional standard-- electronic documents with visible connections.

IMPOSSIBLE ON MAC, WINDOWS AND LINUX

When Xerox PARC released their first computer with a "modern" interface, the Alto, they did not offer visible connections between windows, though such connections would have been possible.* But when the Alto was imitated by the Apple Macintosh and then Microsoft Windows, such connections became impossible. And needless to say, the further imitations of these windows on Linux don't make such connections possible either.

* Alan Kay, personal communication.

IMPOSSIBLE ON THE WEB

The World Wide Web took part of our concept, the "hyperlink" (we called it the jump-link, since you can't see where you're going), and left out the visible interconnections (which would allow you to see where you'e going). In his 1989 proposal for the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee said:

There are few products which take Ted Nelson's idea of a wide "docuverse" literally by allowing links between nodes in different databases. In order to do this, some standardisation would be necessary.*

Containing:Project Xanadu

Published:8 mo. ago Wednesday, October 4th, 2023

Author:

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