Ted Nelson Releases Xanadu

ewen writes "Ted Nelson has at last released the source to Xanadu, the extremely rich but never-quite-finished hypertext system. There was a couple of sessions at the O'Reilly Open Source conference yesterday, which Jon Udell has written up, and Dave Winer has posted some background material and thoughts at his website, www.scripting.com. "

Re:It looks interesting but ...

I feel the problem with implementing Xanadu was that the implementation technology of the late 80's simply wasn't up to the task. The hardware wasn't up to it, the Internet hadn't taken off yet (At one time they were planning to set up their own network), OO tools were crude and not yet performance optimized, and the cathedral style of development meant that there were never enough minds at work on it. Also the problem was partially Ted homself. He's not a programmer, but a designer. He is at the mercy of other peoples implementation and *funding* since he's not capable of hacking it out himself. He's a great designer, but he seems to think sideways from most other people and has a love of inventing new terminology which makes it difficult to convey his ideas and designs to others. So he's had a very difficult time getting financial support to build this stuff. Add in a little bit of bad luck here and there and you have a 20 year delay.

Hopefully open sourceing it will help. I know some of the Squeak Smalltalk hackers (including myself) are interested in moving the Udanax Gold code to Squeak and already a preliminary reformatting and analysis of the code has been done. Apparantly Mark Miller has also expressed interest in a Squeak port.

As I understand it the reason that the C version is preferred initially is simply because it is in a more complete state, being an older design and implementation. Some people are going to have trouble conceptualizing what Xanadu is capable of, so having something they can see in operation, even if it is missing some of the features of the more recent design, is going to be a big win.

For once history hapenned right.

The World Wide Web was created before the deluge of software patenting and after hypertext linking had been invented. The Government, as much as we like to complain about it, had a redundant network in place that could handle hypertext linking ARPANET. Most importantly, in 1990 Tim Berners-Lee was coding the World Wide Web on his NeXT machine at Cern while Ted Nelson was XEROXing literary machines 90.1.

If any of this had of hapenned out of step, Ted Nelson could have invented the web, patented his software, making his system the standard. Thusly turning your PC into an

INFERNAL GUMBALL MACHINE OF INFORMATION.

Think I'm out of bounds???? Students, please turn to page 5/13 of Literary Mchines 90.1:

ROYALTIES IN THE XANADU PUBLISHING METHOD

amongst are for those who do not have a copy;

BYTE ROYALTY;
a royalty for every byte delivered.

LINK ROYALTY;
a royalty for links to other documents.

if that wasn't enough, how about a

AUTHORS FUND;
a royalty for everything delivered to the network. If publisher owns material, he gets rebated. Otherwise TAX would be appropriate description.

Let me put it visually for you. You know that little counter you get at KINKO's to make copies with?? Imagine that plugged into your PC. And imagine it spinning really fast.

You thought the RIAA is bad with MP3s?? Well how much music do you listen to as to compared to digging for info on the Web??

Don't get me wrong. I believe in giving every author, written, electronic, musically or otherwise not only their just due, but their asking price for the work they offer. I don't mind a bit going to a secure server and paying for content, no matter what it is.

What I do mind is automatic collection, another opportunity for an unjustified tax by a chrony politician, and exorbitant fees for material that I don't need or want to buy.

As I see it, I don't mind buying the beer, but clean water is everbody's right.

Thanks to the way history is we have the possibility of new revolutions in things seemingly unrelated as computer chips and medicine, or network redundancy and rainforest conservation, all due to the free flow of information.

Do not forget that the goal of Xanadu was and is to be an advanced fee collection system. Because history hapenned right, Xanadu almost seems to be a technological afterthought. It is a curiosity to be examined and avoided.

Hyperwave

The name has changed since: HG is now known as Hyperwave Information Server and it is a commercial product. More info at http://www.hyperwave.de [hyperwave.de]

I have tinkered with HWIS 4.0 and think it is really nice system to implement intra/extranets and it runs on several architectures including Linux. If you don't want to customize the interface it is fast to get up and running.

Some of the features include

• documents are stored to database (native or oracle
• links are separated from text/html and their integrity is automatically maintaned
• dynamic navigation structures
• rights management
• integrated verity search engine
• ODMA support (save from apps to server directly)
• Windows Explorer extensions (HWIS looks like a network neighborhood)
• SSL
• NT / Unix authentication gateway
• Multilangage support
• Saveable searchobjects that notify changes by email
• Server clustering
• Annotation for any object
• Workflow

New 5.0 version includes messageboards and mail.Haven't tested it yet though

Yes, "gold" can.

It can't be layered as such.

The system Ted Nelson invented is a global naming system for very large data sets; not unlike the Dewey decimal system some libraries use for indexing books.

Sadly the naming system can't handle changes to the referenced text, so in order not to break the references, every version of the document that was ever created has to be kept.

Not really. (You're thinking of his early descriptions of the concept.)

In "gold" the issues of location and labeling were separated, as was version tracking. You can inquire about intermediate versions of a document, but if no server you can reach happens to have saved a copy of them them you can't read them. Servers can in principle "burn all the copies" of a published version, archive them and lose the archive, and so on.

For some kinds of content the server can compute it on the fly, so nobody ever has to save a copy (though other servers might cache it). This corresponds to documents with dynamic content, such as query retrievals and other CGI-generated stuff.

The web also has a hierarchical global naming system, and while it can't index down to a specific paragraph in a document, it can index as far as a well-known entry point within a document.

While the web does have problems with global names, those problems would only be worse with a system like Xanadu.

Again you're confusing indexing with identity. "Gold" handles identity as a separate item. The identity of a document is a history track across versions. "The current issue of Wired magazine" would be one such identity, as would "the latest rough of the December 1999 issue of Wired magazine". You "Publish" the December issue by "hopping the bert" of the current issue onto the same version as the "bert" of the rough of the December issue, creating a new entry in the issue history with exactly the same content as the rough.

The history of the "current issue" bert is thus the set of published issues, while the history of the "December 1999 rough" is the history of the assembly of the issue. The current state of the "current issue" bert is the copy on the newsstand, you can see the publishing history by viewing the bert history, and you can read the back issues (if somebody saved the bits and will serve them to you) by viewing through the previous states of the bert.

As for importing the whole web, "gold" lets you create a placeholder for an external document. Initially you can view the external document through the placeholder - and your server will compose a query to the external system if possible, or tell you that you can't view it yet. Later, if the external document can be and is imported into the system, the owner of the placeholder can "unify" it to the on-system version, declaring the on-system verson to be canonical and giving up his ownership rights to the owner of the canonical version.