[HN Gopher] Project Xanadu
___________________________________________________________________
Project Xanadu
Author : alokrai
Score : 55 points
Date : 2021-02-21 18:54 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (en.wikipedia.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (en.wikipedia.org)
| mimixco wrote:
| Getting to Xanadu: https://mimix.io/en/blog/xanadu
| kristopolous wrote:
| There's no GitHub because Ted doesn't believe in open source.
|
| He's not on board with open systems at all
|
| We don't talk anymore because of that disagreement. I tried to
| convince him to blow the thing open and tried to explain how
| that's how projects get accelerated. Nope, not happening.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| I wrote about this on HN a few years ago, and Dave Winer's
| Userland Frontier discussion group a couple decades ago,
| after Xanadu released some open source code, which was
| actually the output of a Smalltalk=>C++ transpiler. (That
| code was actually from a team Autodesk, not directed by Ted
| Nelson -- see his reply below.)
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16224154
|
| I think his biggest problem is that he refuses to collaborate
| with other people, or build on top of current technology.
| He's had a lot of great important inspirational ideas, but
| his implementation of those ideas didn't go anywhere, he's
| angry and bitter, and he hasn't bothered re-implementing them
| with any of the "inferior technologies" that he rejects.
|
| Back in 1999, project Xanadu released their source code as
| open source. It was a classic example of "open sourcing"
| something that was never going to ship otherwise, and that
| nobody could actually use or improve, just to get some
| attention ("open source" was a huge fad at the time).
|
| http://www.theregister.co.uk/1999/08/27/web_precursor_xanadu.
| ..
|
| >Register believe it or not factoid: Nelson's book Computer
| Lib was at one point published by Microsoft Press. Oh yes.
| (r)
|
| They originally wrote Xanadu in Smalltalk, then implemented a
| Smalltalk to C++ compiler, and finally they released the
| machine generated output of that compiler, which was
| unreadable and practically useless. It completely missed the
| point and purpose of "open source software".
|
| I looked at the code when it was released in 1999 and wrote
| up some initial reactions that Dave Winer asked me to post to
| his UserLand Frontier discussion group:
|
| http://static.userland.com/userlanddiscussarchive/msg010163..
| ..
|
| http://static.userland.com/userlanddiscussarchive/msg010164..
| ..
|
| http://static.userland.com/userlanddiscussarchive/msg010165..
| ..
|
| http://static.userland.com/userlanddiscussarchive/msg010166..
| ..
|
| http://static.userland.com/userlanddiscussarchive/msg010167..
| ..
|
| A few excerpts (remember I wrote this in 1999 so some of the
| examples are dated):
|
| >Sheez. You don't actually believe anybody will be able to do
| anything useful with all that source code, do you? Take a
| look at the code. It's mostly uncommented glue gluing glue to
| glue. Nothing reusable there.
|
| >Have you gotten it running? The documentation included was
| not very helpful. Is there a web page that tells me how to
| run Xanadu? Did you have to install Python, and run it in a
| tty window?
|
| >What would be much more useful, would be some well written
| design documents and port-mortems, comparisons with current
| technologies like DHTML, XML, XLink, XPath, HyTime, XSL, etc,
| and proposals for extending current technologies and using
| them to capture the good ideas of Xanadu.
|
| >Has Xanadu been used to document its own source code? How
| does it compare to, say, the browseable cross-referenced
| mozilla source code? Or Knuth's classic Literate Programming
| work with TeX?
|
| >Last time I saw Ted Nelson talk (a few years ago at Ted
| Selker's NPUC workshop at IBM Almaden), he was quite bitter,
| but he didn't have anything positive to contribute. He talked
| about how he invented everything before anyone else, but
| everyone thought he was crazy, and how the world wide web
| totally sucks, but it's not his fault, if only they would
| have listened to him. And he verbally attacked a nice guy
| from Netscape (Martin Haeberli -- Paul's brother) for lame
| reasons, when there were plenty of other perfectly valid
| things to rag the poor guy about.
|
| >Don't get me wrong -- I've got my own old worn-out copy of
| the double sided Dream Machines / Computer Lib, as well as
| Literary Machines, which I enjoyed and found very inspiring.
| I first met the Xanadu guys some time ago in the 80's, when
| they were showing off Xanadu at the MIT AI lab.
|
| >I was a "random turist" high school kid visiting the AI lab
| on a pilgrimage. That was when I first met Hugh Daniel: this
| energetic excited big hairy hippie guy in a Xanadu baseball
| cap with wings, who I worked with later, hacking NeWS. Hugh
| and I worked together for two different companies porting
| NeWS to the Mac.
|
| >I "got" the hypertext demo they were showing (presumably the
| same code they've finally released -- that they were running
| on an Ann Arbor Ambassador, of course). I thought Xanadu was
| neat and important, but an obvious idea that had been around
| in many forms, that a lot of people were working on. It
| reminded me of the "info" documentation browser in emacs (but
| it wasn't programmable).
|
| >The fact that Xanadu didn't have a built-in extension
| language was a disappointment, since extensibility was an
| essential ingredient to the success of Emacs, HyperCard,
| Director, and the World Wide Web.
|
| >I would be much more interested in reading about why Xanadu
| failed, and how it was found to be inadequate, than how great
| it would have been if only it had taken over the world.
|
| >Anyway, my take on all this hyper-crap is that it's useless
| without a good scripting language. I think that's why Emacs
| was so successful, why HyperCard was so important, what made
| NeWS so interesting, why HyperLook was so powerful, why
| Director has been so successful, how it's possible for you to
| read this discussion board served by Frontier, and what made
| the World Wide Web what it is today: they all had extension
| languages built into them.
|
| >So what's Xanadu's scripting language story? Later on, in
| the second version, they obviously recognized the need for an
| interactive programming language like Smalltalk, for
| development.
|
| >But a real-world system like the World Wide Web is
| CONSTANTLY in development (witness all the stupid "under
| construction" icons), so the Xanadu back and front end
| developers aren't the only people who need the flexibility
| that only an extension language can provide. As JavaScript
| and the World Wide Web have proven, authors (the many people
| writing web pages) need extension languages at least as much
| as developers (the few people writing browsers and servers).
|
| >Ideally, an extension language should be designed into the
| system from day one. JavaScript kind of fits the bill, but
| was really just nailed onto the side of HTML as an
| afterthought, and is pretty kludgey compared to how it could
| have been.
|
| >That's Xanadu's problem too -- it tries to explain the
| entire universe from creation to collapse in terms of one
| grand unified theory, when all we need now are some practical
| techniques for rubbing sticks together to make fire, building
| shelters over our heads to keep the rain out, and convincing
| people to be nice and stop killing each other. The grandiose
| theories of Xanadu were certainly ahead of their time.
|
| >It's the same old story of gross practicality winning out
| over pure idealism.
|
| >Anyway, my point, as it relates to Xanadu, and is
| illustrated by COM (which has its own, more down-to-earth set
| of ideals), is that it's the interfaces, and the ideas and
| protocols behind them, that are important. Not the
| implementation. Code is (and should be) throw-away.
|
| >There's nothing wrong with publishing old code for
| educational purposes, to learn from its successes and
| mistakes, but don't waste your time trying to make it into
| something it's not.
|
| Ted replied to the HN thread:
|
| >The 1999 "source code" referred to above is in two parts:
| xu88, the design my group worked out in 1979, now called
| "Xanadu Green", described in my book "Literary Machines"; and
| a later design I repudiate, called "Udanax Gold", which the
| team at XOC (not under direction of Roger Gregory or myself)
| redesigned for four years until terminated by Autodesk.
| That's the one with the dual implementation in Smalltalk.
| They tried hard but not on my watch. Please distinguish
| between these two endeavors.
| dwohnitmok wrote:
| I mean open systems would be fundamentally in tension with
| the whole idea of paid, proprietary transclusion that's one
| of the central pillars of Xanadu right?
| kristopolous wrote:
| Yeah sure.
|
| This is still pretty nascent distinction I'm thinking of
| but I think there's at least 2 types of innovators.
|
| Those that can delegate and cede the process of new ideas
| and fundamental control and know others will act in good
| faith and shepherd things to the finish line. Examples are
| TBL and Torvalds, who may be a tough cookie, but isn't
| involved in everything; IBM, Nvidia and Google do their
| thing.
|
| Then there is the other kind. There's not many kind words
| for these folks. They'll never delegate creativity or
| control, only tasks.
|
| Xanadu ideally, and at a previous time in actual documents,
| was envisioned as a proprietary publishing empire, you know
| as if you'd get a mythical Alan Kay Xanadu Dynabook that'd
| have all the dreams manifest.
|
| Sometimes these people are also really good and can make it
| happen, like Steve Jobs. But most of the time, they aren't
| good at something and not willing to cede it, something
| critical. Other times people aren't willing to do the work,
| it's too much of a barrier.
|
| These types of people can succeed marvelously in smaller
| ideas. The perfectionist restaurant where the all star chef
| controls everything is basically every michelin star
| restaurant explained.
|
| Same goes for great movies or music. Michael Jackson and
| Hitchcock were supposedly like this.
|
| It's just a harder model to make work for big ideas. So
| much harder it usually just can't be done.
|
| I really want a Nelson system but unless he can move
| himself to the TBL column and give way on crucial tenants,
| I really don't see it happening and having large adoption.
|
| These personality types seem distrustful of people like me,
| as if I'm going to steal their valor. I have invariably
| failed to explain that no, I want them to succeed, give me
| 0 dollars and 0 credit.
|
| I usually recommend don't even cede to me, but to some
| other, brilliant person, that I have no connection with.
| However, that's not compatible with their model of human
| motivation so their distrust becomes further entrenched,
| usually with me AND the recommendation. It's ugly.
|
| I don't know how to work with these brilliant people.
|
| For instance, Ted's micropayment system is essentially what
| Eich achieved using his BAT cryptocurrency in the Brave
| browser. He ceded massive controls to make it happen. Now
| places like Wikipedia and the Internet Archive are
| accepting BATs.
|
| A true Nelsonite would debate with me how Eich's BATs are
| no true Scotsman, and that's the problem. They're close
| enough damn it, let it go. You aren't always going to get a
| bull's-eye on the dart board of life. Make it a stepping
| stone, a pipeline to the true life, whatever, just don't
| dismiss the good as the enemy of the perfect. I'm sure the
| first iphone and first ipod wasn't all of Steve's ideas
| made manifest. Heck, if he didn't have a perfect favorable
| storm with Microsoft floating Apple during their late 90s
| antitrust, none of Apple's second spring would've happened
| either.
|
| Nelson's ideas work, that's what TBL proved with the w3, he
| just needs to structure them for success.
| anotheryou wrote:
| I'd say to make transclusions with the micro transactions
| work it _has_ to be an open standard. It needs browser
| support and people willing to use it encoding their work.
| dwohnitmok wrote:
| Ah sorry I don't mean the mechanism itself, I was
| referring to the content.
|
| Although even in the case of the standard, leaving aside
| whether this would make Xanadu feasible or not, I'm not
| sure given Xanadu's history whether it was ever conceived
| of being "open" in the same way, say HTML is.
|
| There are plenty of standards that are effectively closed
| and require payment to access and read (see e.g. ISO
| standards as well as, in the U.S. the state of Georgia
| very nearly getting away with putting legally-binding
| annotations behind a paywall:
| https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/04/supreme-
| court-ru...). I think Xanadu's philosophy would've lent
| it to a similar approach, independent of what this would
| mean for its survival.
| tannhaeuser wrote:
| That you've got to pay for a copy of many (but not all
| [1]) ISO standards doesn't make them closed. Lack of
| funding for standardization work and the expectation that
| everything must be had at no cost is what gets you
| monopolies and dominating players, such as with so-called
| web standards. Nothing new really; citing from a post by
| Paul Prescod from 1997 in the context of subsetting XML
| from SGML [2]:
|
| > _Are you happy with the process for developing and
| improving HTML? Do you feel that the results are of high
| quality? Do you think that you 've had sufficient input?
| [...]_
|
| > _In order to influence ISO standards you need only be
| recognized as an expert in your country. Unless your
| country is an oligarchy or dictatorship, this will cost
| you very little or nothing at all [...]_
|
| [1]: https://standards.iso.org/ittf/PubliclyAvailableStan
| dards/in... (beware comically broken page on mobile)
|
| [2]: http://lists.xml.org/archives/xml-
| dev/199710/msg00189.html
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Here's another comment I wrote in the HN discussion from
| a couple years ago about "Ted Nelson on What Modern
| Programmers Can Learn from the Past [video] (ieee.org)",
| in which James Clark talked about his role in the
| transition from SGML to XML, and the value of standards
| being sufficiently simple to have multiple interoperable
| implementations:
|
| IEEE Article and video about "Ted Nelson on What Modern
| Programmers Can Learn from the Past":
|
| https://spectrum.ieee.org/video/geek-life/profiles/ted-
| nelso...
|
| HN discussion:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16222520
|
| My comment and quotes from the DDJ interview of James
| Clark, "The Triumph of Simplicity":
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16227249
|
| In the ideal world we would all be using s-expressions
| and Lisp, but now XML and JSON fill the need of language-
| independent data formats.
|
| >Not trying to defend XSLT (which I find to be a mixed
| bag), but you're aware that it's precursor was DSSSL
| (Scheme), with pretty much a one-to-one correspondence of
| language constructs and symbol names, aren't you?
|
| The mighty programmer James Clark wrote the de-facto
| reference SGML parser and DSSSL implementation, was
| technical lead of the XML working group, and also helped
| design and implement XSLT and XPath (not to mention
| expat, Trex / RELAX NG, etc)! It was totally flexible and
| incredibly powerful, but massively complicated, and you
| had to know scheme, which blew a lot of people's minds.
| But the major factor that killed SGML and DSSSL was the
| emergence of HTML, XML and XSLT, which were orders of
| magnitude simpler.
|
| James Clark:
|
| http://www.jclark.com/
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Clark_(programmer)
|
| There's a wonderful DDJ interview with James Clark called
| "A Triumph of Simplicity: James Clark on Markup Languages
| and XML" where he explains how a standard has failed if
| everyone just uses the reference implementation, because
| the point of a standard is to be crisp and simple enough
| that many different implementations can interoperate
| perfectly.
|
| A Triumph of Simplicity: James Clark on Markup Languages
| and XML:
|
| http://www.drdobbs.com/a-triumph-of-simplicity-james-
| clark-o...
|
| I think it's safe to say that SGML and DSSSL fell short
| of that sought-after simplicity, and XML and XSLT were
| the answer to that.
|
| "The standard has to be sufficiently simple that it makes
| sense to have multiple implementations." -James Clark
|
| My (completely imaginary) impression of the XSLT
| committee is that there must have been representatives of
| several different programming languages (Lisp, Prolog,
| C++, RPG, Brainfuck, etc) sitting around the conference
| table facing off with each other, and each managed to get
| a caricature of their language's cliche cool programming
| technique hammered into XSLT, but without the other
| context and support it needed to actually be useful. So
| nobody was happy!
|
| Then Microsoft came out with MSXML, with an XSL processor
| that let you include <script> tags in your XSLT documents
| to do all kinds of magic stuff by dynamically accessing
| the DOM and performing arbitrary computation (in
| VBScript, JavaScript, C#, or any IScriptingEngine
| compatible language). Once you hit a wall with XSLT you
| could drop down to JavaScript and actually get some work
| done. But after you got used to manipulating the DOM in
| JavaScript with XPath, you being to wonder what you ever
| needed XSLT for in the first place, and why you don't
| just write a nice flexible XML transformation library in
| JavaScript, and forget about XSLT.
|
| XSLT Stylesheet Scripting Using <msxsl:script>:
|
| https://docs.microsoft.com/en-
| us/dotnet/standard/data/xml/xs...
|
| Excerpts from the DDJ interview (it's fascinating -- read
| the whole thing!):
|
| >DDJ: You're well known for writing very good reference
| implementations for SGML and XML Standards. How important
| is it for these reference implementations to be good
| implementations as opposed to just something that works?
|
| >JC: Having a reference implementation that's too good
| can actually be a negative in some ways.
|
| >DDJ: Why is that?
|
| >JC: Well, because it discourages other people from
| implementing it. If you've got a standard, and you have
| only one real implementation, then you might as well not
| have bothered having a standard. You could have just
| defined the language by its implementation. The point of
| standards is that you can have multiple implementations,
| and they can all interoperate.
|
| >You want to make the standard sufficiently easy to
| implement so that it's not so much work to do an
| implementation that people are discouraged by the
| presence of a good reference implementation from doing
| their own implementation.
|
| >DDJ: Is that necessarily a bad thing? If you have a
| single implementation that's good enough so that other
| people don't feel like they have to write another
| implementation, don't you achieve what you want with a
| standard in that all implementations -- in this case,
| there's only one of them -- work the same?
|
| >JC: For any standard that's really useful, there are
| different kinds of usage scenarios and different classes
| of users, and you can't have one implementation that fits
| all. Take SGML, for example. Sometimes you want a really
| heavy-weight implementation that does validation and
| provides lots of information about a document. Sometimes
| you'd like a much lighter weight implementation that just
| runs as fast as possible, doesn't validate, and doesn't
| provide much information about a document apart from
| elements and attributes and data. But because it's so
| much work to write an SGML parser, you end up having one
| SGML parser that supports everything needed for a huge
| variety of applications, which makes it a lot more
| complicated. It would be much nicer if you had one SGML
| parser that is perfect for this application, and another
| SGML parser that is perfect for this other application.
| To make that possible, the standard has to be
| sufficiently simple that it makes sense to have multiple
| implementations.
|
| >DDJ: Is there any markup software out there that you
| like to use and that you haven't written yourself?
|
| >JC: The software I probably use most often that I
| haven't written myself is Microsoft's XML parser and XSLT
| implementation. Their current version does a pretty
| credible job of doing both XML and XSLT. It's remarkable,
| really. If you said, back when I was doing SGML and
| DSSSL, that one day, you'd find as a standard part of
| Windows this DLL that did pretty much the same thing as
| SGML and DSSSL, I'd think you were dreaming. That's one
| thing I feel very happy about, that this formerly niche
| thing is now available to everybody.
| [deleted]
| ahmedfromtunis wrote:
| Ted Nelson, in his own words, in a video by Notion:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JN1IBkAcJ1E
| duckfang wrote:
| I completely reject Project Xanadu, for one primary reason: it
| turns an open web into a per-page paywall DRM horror. And where
| money comes, user tracking and anti-privacy tech follows.
|
| Right now, it takes time and effort to paywall stuff. It's not
| super hard, but is not a seamless flip-a-switch-on paywall.
|
| With Xanadu, that paywall is built in at the core - request a
| page, pay the cost, get the page and hope its what you want. And
| I can only imagine the level of scrape-scams at that level - spam
| would be not only viable but make money per click.
|
| Sure, I could imagine useful tools to prevent hemorrhaging money,
| but the threat of clicking links and owing 1-10$ for that is
| horrifying.
|
| Hard pass. It does deserve a study in its technology and closed-
| sourceness when it was devised. But it needs to stay in the
| scrap-bin of history.
| Rochus wrote:
| Transclusion is a great concept which I first time saw and used
| in Jacobson's Objectory software engineering tool. It's also
| available in the CrossLine information manager (see
| https://github.com/rochus-keller/CrossLine).
| 5cents wrote:
| Transclusions are great indeed! With proper filer mechanisms
| it's amazing what you can do. Have a look a TiddlyWiki
| (https://tiddlywiki.com/), which is open source and essentially
| built on transclusions. It's a bit hard to explain, but when
| one gets one's head around the concept, it's _extremely_
| powerful and flexible!
| anotheryou wrote:
| Roam Research also has them.
| jaakl wrote:
| Yep, and RR gives nice preview what web would look like with
| two-way links.
| anotheryou wrote:
| Just too bad it's also no open standard and for now in the
| cloud.
|
| I tried in for a little product review I did of a friends
| app. Once I was done I found out there is no good way to
| export any of it to anything readable...
|
| My choices where broken markdown or css-hacks for clean
| screenshots.
| joe_the_user wrote:
| Transclusion is an appealing and beautiful seeming idea but
| it's an extremely difficult thing to implement. Even more, it's
| not at all evident in the end if it's desirable. Transclusion
| involves effectively conditionally including text or other
| fragments within documents.
|
| It's easy for schemes of this sort to become fragile
| constructs. Moreover, the primary motivation for such an
| approach is copyright management - IE, fighting the
| "information wants to be free" tendency.
| anotherhue wrote:
| Not only is the Xanadu system fascinating, but the odyssey of its
| on-and-off development should be required reading for any
| software professional.
| dang wrote:
| If curious, past threads:
|
| _Xanadu Basics - Visible Connection (2018) [video]_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20258942 - June 2019 (25
| comments)
|
| _"Xanadu Hypertext Documents" architecture and data structures,
| 2019 edition_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19745517 -
| April 2019 (1 comment)
|
| _Project Xanadu_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19710142
| - April 2019 (32 comments)
|
| _Ted Nelson 's Pre-Final Reply to "The Curse of Xanadu" by Gary
| Wolf / Gory Jackal_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19672373 - April 2019 (1
| comment)
|
| _Getting to Xanadu_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18635123 - Dec 2018 (55
| comments)
|
| _Xanadu_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15269827 - Sept
| 2017 (86 comments)
|
| _Ted Nelson presents a working prototype version of Xanadu_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12386339 - Aug 2016 (1
| comment)
|
| _Roads to Xanadu_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10642143 - Nov 2015 (6
| comments)
|
| _The Xanadu Parallel Universe_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10470068 - Oct 2015 (2
| comments)
|
| _Xanadu: we have a working deliverable_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7849389 - June 2014 (99
| comments)
|
| _The Curse of Xanadu (1995)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4160525 - June 2012 (2
| comments)
|
| _The Curse of Xanadu (1995)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1583311 - Aug 2010 (6
| comments)
|
| _How Xanadu Works: technical overview_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=962315 - Nov 2009 (5
| comments)
|
| _The Xanadu Dream_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=876469
| - Oct 2009 (15 comments)
|
| _The Curse of Xanadu_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=795155 - Aug 2009 (18
| comments)
|
| Others?
| qwerty456127 wrote:
| Isn't this something like Roam/Obsidian, just more
| complicated&academic to the point of unimplementability?
| aeturnum wrote:
| Ah Xanadu! I always think of the 1995 "The Curse of Xanadu" in
| wired[1], both because it's good and because it's from an age
| when the idea of universal connection felt much further away.
|
| [1] https://www.wired.com/1995/06/xanadu/
| LeonB wrote:
| Ted Nelson's response to wired is an interesting read:
| http://web.archive.org/web/20001101230424/http://www2.educ.k...
| johnchristopher wrote:
| So, last time I mentioned that article on HN (and with the same
| enthusiasm you display) a nice fellow completed my post
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15270358) with this:
|
| > If that's the case could you please post Nelson's responses
| http://web.archive.org/web/20001101230424/http://www2.educ.k...
| http://web.archive.org/web/20001003011753/http://xanadu.com....
| along with it.j
|
| :)
| aeturnum wrote:
| Oh thanks! I didn't know that he'd responded.
| karlicoss wrote:
| Nelson's "Computers for Cynics" is also an interesting take
| https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLTI2Kz0V2OFlgbkROVmzk...
| 7thaccount wrote:
| There is an amazing indy video game called "Kentucky Route Zero"
| which is an adventure esque game where you explore a mysterious
| magical road in Kentucky and meet all sorts of fantastical people
| and creatures. It is bizarre and the genre is probably best
| described as magical surrealism.
|
| Anyway _Spoilers_ when going through one of the caves, you meat
| these bizarre computer science researchers who have an old
| mainframe named Xanadu. It 's all a reference to the actual
| project that shot for the moon and just kinda got left behind.
| Interesting historical tidbits shoved in the game.
| thih9 wrote:
| OpenXanadu demo (2014):
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KIOuRuvQ10c
| gumby wrote:
| It was clear that the WWW was a good idea but it clearly wouldn't
| succeed because of the foolish decision not to have back links.
| But it might gain a bit of traction and make people receptive for
| the real thing. I attended more than one significant academic
| conference in the early 90s where this belief was uttered to
| general agreement. People had even already experienced broken
| links and yet couldn't put 2 and 2 together.
|
| I also wanted bidirectional links even though I was a Lisp
| programmer! In case it's not clear, one way links was an inspired
| decision.
|
| Another belief, in the latter part of the 90s, was that decent
| web search was basically impossible as someone would have to
| store a copy of the whole thing, which is clearly impossible.
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