[HN Gopher] OpenXanadu ___________________________________________________________________ OpenXanadu Author : warent Score : 51 points Date : 2022-07-24 17:18 UTC (5 hours ago) (HTM) web link (xanadu.com) (TXT) w3m dump (xanadu.com) | kwatsonafter wrote: | a quote from the system: "Adam and Lilith began to fight. She | said, 'I will not lie below,' and he said, 'I will not lie | beneath you, but only on top. For you are fit only to be in the | bottom position, while am to be in the superior one.' Lilith | responded, 'We are equal to each other inasmuch as we were both | created from the earth." | | That's just a few seconds of clicking around in systems like | this. It's like surfing with a fucking jetpak. | | Spend a few minutes with the demo and try to, "feel" the concept. | I would pay huge amounts of money to have all my research | materials, "Xanadu'd." (Anyone looking to be hired?) | johnorourke wrote: | I remember reading about the never-ending story of Xanadu in a | 1992 issue of Dr Dobbs Journal, which my local newsagent had to | order specially for me... no web in those days. Imagine: there | will be developers reading this who weren't even born when it was | _already_ vapourware! | EarlKing wrote: | Maybe it's just me, but it feels like Xanadu was always | vaporware for a very important reason: It never had a | specification concrete enough to implement because its chief | architect always came off like a schizophrenic. I can't be | alone in thinking that. No one who's read any of the numerous | papers and books surrounding this fiasco can walk away thinking | it's author is sane. There's just something about that "stream | of consciousness" style of all Ted Nelson's papers that point | to there being something fundamentally wrong with him. | | I say all this not to be a dick, mind you, but to point out | that when something has been vapoware for decades that maybe | it's time to ignore the guy who's at the heart of it and, if | there's anything useful in it, move on without him. The world | did that as far as hypertext goes. Now if only the world could | do that with GNU. | kwatsonafter wrote: | There's a fine line between schizophrenia and creative genius | and Nelson walks that line enormously all things considered. | Project Xanadu aside Computer Lib and his work on HyperText | systems in the 1960's are still incredibly ahead their time. | Nelson is a pioneer on the same level as McCarthy, Kay, or | Minsky but he didn't come up the way that they did. He's | firstly a filmmaker; I think a lot of people miss this. | | It's worth noting that Brenda Laurel, Alan Kay, Nelson, and | Seymour Papert had, "art" backgrounds. The future of | computing will effectively be led by people with these cross- | sectional skills. There's a reason programmers are shitty at | designing software. | kabes wrote: | Ted also got into fights with almost everybody he ever worked | with on Xanadu | EarlKing wrote: | Did he? This is a part of the story I've never heard. Got | any stories / links? | mepian wrote: | > Now if only the world could do that with GNU. | | What do you mean? GNU is not vaporware, many people use it on | top of Linux. Do you mean GNU/Hurd? | kwatsonafter wrote: | It's people like you that killed FOSS and I'm glad Stallman | got pedo-cancelled. | EarlKing wrote: | GNU is Generally Not Usable in any real sense. I say that | as someone who has to use Linux and FreeBSD on a daily | basis. That said, yes, Hurd is the biggest example of the | failure of GNU. | vincent-manis wrote: | I'm not clear: Linux and FreeBSD are GNU products? I | didn't know! I scoured www.gnu.org, and couldn't find | either there. (GNU/Linux refers to a GNU userland coupled | with Linux, you know.) | | I've been using Emacs happily for going on 40 years. | Thanks for alerting me that Emacs is Generally Not | Usable. I didn't know. | EarlKing wrote: | You know precisely that Linux and FreeBSD both depend | upon GNU utilities. ("GNU/Linux refers to a GNU userland | coupled with Linux") Don't be obtuse. If Emacs works for | you then that's great, but if you are at all interested | in having a system that works then you should be prepared | to hear that for other people your preferred solution | doesn't work, and why, be prepared to acknowledge that, | and accept that something should be done to fix that. | Responding with hostility is not at all productive and is | precisely why GNU remains unusable for the majority. | quesera wrote: | Your argument seems to be that GNU has failed because it | isn't the majority choice for general purpose computing | systems. | | Correct me if I'm wrong, because that makes no sense at | all. | quesera wrote: | FreeBSD does not depend on GNU utilities. | msla wrote: | The Web existed in 1992 (invented 1989) just not for you. | Gopher also existed by then (1991) and you maybe see the | problem: The real world gave people something usable long | before Xanadu could even begin to get off the ground. The same | thing happened with the Internet versus OSI: The Internet | protocol suite rendered the OSI protocols mostly irrelevant to | the point people now insist OSI is just a model and the | protocols are never mentioned. Insisting that we all think in | terms of a seven-layer model while using SMTP instead of X.400 | for email is some delicate mix of funny and infuriating | otherwise known only to the parents of small children. | kwatsonafter wrote: | Legend is that at CERN they flipped a coin to decide whether they | would choose Xanadu or Tim Berner Lee's WWW as their Hypertext | system. | | That day coins failed us. | NonNefarious wrote: | Animats wrote: | Everything is pay per view in Xanadu. It's a micropayment model. | When you read, you pay, and the payments are distributed, word by | word, to all the creators of the input text. It's for storing | expensive information in expensive computers to be sold | expensively. Think of it as a successor to Mead Data Central, | Lexis, and Nexis[1], early centralized and expensive information | retrieval systems. (Those are still around, merged into Reed | Elsevier, publisher of expensive books and journals.) | | The technology became cheap enough that such a business model was | unnecessary. Although it was considered in the early days of the | Web. Early thinking was that you'd have to subscribe to | everything, and there would be charges on your Internet bill for | each service, like cable TV. You'd pay to subscribe to a search | engine. The New York Times went that route successfully, but few | others did. | | I knew some of the people behind Xanadu in the 1980s. They were | mostly everything-is-a-market libertarians. | | [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LexisNexis | kwatsonafter wrote: | A very informative post. I think a lot of the young people hip | to Nelson miss this point. I'm no longer a, "free and open | everything" kind of person but Nelson is far more of a BioShock | character than you'd think. He's not a baby boomer in any | sense; he's a child of Welles, Hawks, and Howard Hughes. I | could see him being old enough not to freak out over Birth Of A | Nation. | | God bless that crazy bastard. We used to make Americans so | well. | hgazx wrote: | This crashed the safari tab on my iPhone, lol. | [deleted] | woleium wrote: | Wait, what? What does this show? | | The link goes to an example. The front page of the site says the | following, whish doesn't help much: | | 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. | | We propose a new kind of writing-- PARALLEL PAGES, VISIBLY | CONNECTED. | chipotle_coyote wrote: | It's a fascinating dead end in the history of hypertext. Ted | Nelson has always come across to me as either 51% visionary and | 49% crackpot, or the other way 'round. Technically, Xanadu's | bidirectional links and document transclusion (e.g., not just | including links but whole sections of other web pages in yours) | are really interesting. From a copyright standpoint, they're | kind of a mess, and an integral idea of Xanadu is essentially | being able to make links and embedded microdocuments require | micropayments for usage and/or inclusion, which sounds like the | kind of thing that people who don't like libertarians use to | parody libertarian ideas. And, from a practical standpoint, | they've just never gone anywhere -- as far as I can tell, in no | small part because Mr. Nelson is apparently impossible to work | with. | | Earlier discussion: | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15269827 | | A famous (and infamous) article, "The Curse of Xanadu", on "the | longest-running vaporware project in the history of computing, | a 30-year saga of rabid prototyping and heart-slashing despair" | (now closer to 50 years and counting): | https://www.wired.com/1995/06/xanadu/ | | I don't think I'd actually clicked through and seen this demo | before, though, which adds some interesting new objections to | it on my end -- I find the user experience here ugly and | cryptic. I'm sure a much nicer one with these ideas could be | made, but it seems oddly telling that Xanadu's proponents think | this -- and the Xanadu web site in general -- are great ways to | sell the ideas. | sedatk wrote: | Xanadu was the original project in which the term "hypertext" | was coined. It's the primary influence over all hypertext | things, including HTML. Its intended use was "directly embedded | documents" instead of clicking through links. So, this web site | just revives that original idea. I agree that its novelty over | web model is still questionable, but that's how significant it | is. | [deleted] | devd00d wrote: | Yeah, I dont get it either. | patrec wrote: | Imagine web had actual support for hypertext. Then you | couldn't just "hotlink" images, but also "hotlink" (i.e. | natively quote, and annotate) textual content, with arbitrary | start and end-points. As it is, html can't can't even express | the equivalent of margin notes or footnotes, because it has | some braindamaged ideas about inline vs block elements and | the former can't contain the latter (they changed the | nomenclature, but I'm pretty sure the limitation remains). | tannhaeuser wrote: | SGML, the meta-language on which HTML is based, has | entities ie text expansion variables bound to the content | of external resources accessed via URLs or file names. So | HTML _itself_ doesn 't need such mechanisms if it's | understood that general markup facilities of SGML are | available (which however isn't the case with browsers). XML | (XInclude) attempted to establish more granular inclusion | of external document fragments via XPath, but failed on the | web. Even _if_ HTML had transclusion, what would the use | case look like? HTML as a markup vocabulary was introduced | for casual academic publishing at CERN, reusing folklore | SGML markup elements that were already widely used at the | time. You can argue that HTML has been effectively stagnant | while everything around it (CSS and JS) was changed ad | absurdum to cater for HTML 's limitations, but still in an | academic setting, you'll use inline citations or block | quotes with references to sources, just as HTML is | providing. | asoneth wrote: | One thing to keep in mind is that Project Xanadu predates the | web by a decade or so. Whereas the web settled on simple | unidirectional links embedded in linear text documents, Ted | Nelson's Xanadu was aiming for bidirectional transclusion and | nonlinear documents ("zippered lists"). | | Reading old papers from Nelson, Engelbart, or Bush is a lot of | fun, though it can sometimes take a little work to get into a | pre-internet headspace. I don't read very many authors these | days who are attempting to rethink fundamental computer | interface concepts like that, though there are a few. | coldblues wrote: | Huge inspiration for many of the features present in tools such | as Obsidian, Logseq and Roam Research. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-07-24 23:00 UTC)