Project Xanadu
Project Xanadu ( ZAN-ə-doo) was the first hypertext project, founded in 1960 by Ted Nelson. Administrators of Project Xanadu have declared it superior to the World Wide Web, 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 magazine published an article entitled “The Curse of Xanadu”, calling Project Xanadu “the longest-running vaporware story in the history of the computer industry”. 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”, OpenXanadu, was made available in 2014.
Like The Mother of All Demos, Project Xanadu remains the cornerstone of what I think about computation. I know the marketing guys are promising VR AI NFT Crypto Utopias, but computers are still really only good at storing and retrieving data. Organizing and thinking about data is still hard for humans, just like it is for LLM’s.