Pot, meet kettle. Ted's been banging on the Xanadu drum for 50 years... if he'd have just bothered to learn to program, he could have implemented it himself, but it seems he'd rather give interviews about it than sit down at a keyboard.
This is the most ridiculous recurring accusation against someone who has championed the human-oriented use of computers since day one and it's partly his work that means we have PCs at all. So, firstly, Ted can program, secondly, there are versions of Xanadu and ZigZag you can download and try.
I've never seen any indication that Ted has implemented any of his own projects. ZigZag's first demo appears to have been built by Andrew Pam, and a later Java implementation was done by some others.[1]
The page for the Xanadu demo a sibling comment mentions says "The enthusiastic and talented programmer, Rob Smith, of Manchester England, did a beautiful job combining a lot of our ideas" but "Unfortunately this made it a very complicated package, eventually too tangled to improve further, and Rob had to get on to other things. John Ohno and Jonathan Kopetz, in Connecticut, spent several years trying to refactor it, but it's beyond fixing" [2]. I read this as 1) someone implemented a demo for Ted, 2) some other people tried to fix it but gave up, but 3) there's no sign of Ted actually doing any of the work.
If there's proof Ted has actually implemented his own ideas in the past, I'll retract my criticism and refrain from posting it further. I certainly don't argue that the man has been influential, in any case!
Ted's needlessly authoritarian on implementation details, down to very specific details in file formats and how the components interact with each other using protocols that simply do not work.
For instance, he was insisting on ASCII only, byte addressed implementation of a cross referencing system with me in 2014 for the Xanadu implementation you mentioned. I couldn't convince him that multibyte encoding systems were worth considering or that offsets would change leading to fundamental data inconsistencies, thus corrupting formats...the rabbit hole gets deep. He gets very opinionated on details that don't matter and frankly don't work.
Thus it could only ever be a demo because you can't just feed open formats from the open internet it in any dynamic organic way. Everything would have to be curated, filtered, and babysat. That's not memex, that's some digital form of Pearson publishing with some proprietary e-reading system. Which is fine, but TBLs W3 system of intentionally leaving things open ended so every step becomes a potential platform for the next is somuchdramatically better then just a cathedral cross referential monolith hybrid of hypercard and pdf. The brilliance of TBL is the W3 is half assed in just the right ways to make it not yet another unused visual language or mind map format. Should more be done? Sure, of course.
You may think it sounds absurd that Ted thinks there will be manual publishing under some private company's direction in the new format and not automated machine transliteration, I agree, it sounds like an archaic museum piece at the living computer museum in Seattle and not a future oriented system of thought. Well here we are anyway.
He needs to cede ground and intentionally leave pieces open ended so that other groups, in other cultures, with other priorities can fit in their specialized pieces into the puzzle. He apparently is still unwilling.
He's a brilliant philosopher but a classically toxic engineer. Usually that second group is full of people with bad ideas. His are undoubtedly revolutionary and profound, but the delegation of other thought systems to other humans and then interacting with them is like Drucker management 101 and he's just not onboard.
Also, without going into detail Andrew is a backstabbing ass. I hope he reads this and I'll state that publicly.
PS: In case Ted sees this (he probably still doesn't browse hn, but he gets forwarded things), I love you, you know this. You know my criticisms comes from a desire to make the acts as revolutionary as the thought and I want it to happen as much as you do. Hope to hear from you and hope all is well.
I got this file: http://xanadu.com/xuspD9y,2013 which is a .zip file.
So it's ~7years old, Windows only (though full of _MACOSX files). Keyboard only. No installer. No source available. Described as "spent several years trying to refactor it, but it's beyond fixing"
But yeah it does run on my laptop, at least! Any other versions out there?
Ted Nelson's best-known and most influential contribution was not Xanadu, but his book Computer Lib/Dream Machines, which appeared in 1974. Doesn't anyone remember this? It was ubiquitous at the beginning of the personal computer era. This self-published book was very much of its time - it had the same oversize-on-newsprint format and DIY look as the Whole Earth Catalog, which was popular at the same time. It was important because it pursuasively made the case that computing was about to become a medium for self-expresson - a "dream machine" - that was an unheard-of concept at the time. You can use a computer to produce graphics! To play games! How about that! He told about Sutherland's Sketchpad and Englebart's NLS and at a time when these were completely invisible to almost everyone. Xanadu gets a few pages in the book but it is not at all a work of self-promotion - almost the whole book is about the work of others. It's a survey of the computing scene right before personal computers appeared. This book was very timely and I think it provided a lot of inspiration for the personal computer movement. It made you want to try out computing! It has one page about microprocessors: "Here they come ... Microprocessors are what's happening" (the MITS Altair appeared the next year, in 1975).
I think Ted Nelson is one of those people whose main effects are through their influence on others, rather than through what they directly produce themselves.
~25 years ago, when the web was pretty new, I saw Ted Nelson give a talk about it. He was angry that it took so long for the world to wake up and hear the gospel of hypertext. And he was outraged and disappointed that the web didn't implement his vision of hypertext. Links should be two-way! The platform should treat intellectual property as a first-class concept! There should be attributions or royalties (or something, forgot the details)! And it did none of that!
I was tempted to laugh it off and dismiss him as just an envious nutcase, but then I realized something: his vision actually did have a lot of neat ideas in it. I came to the conclusion that Ted Nelson is a creative thinker, who had been way ahead of his time in certain ways. To me, it would be a mistake to not listen to him at all. It would also be a mistake to listen without a huge amount of skepticism.
Xanadu sounds like a first class example of Raymond's Cathedral and Bazaar, with Ted as high priest. Perhaps if he'd gotten his hands dirtier earlier, he'd have better appreciated the impractical demerits of all such grand designs.
Surely once the number of hyperlinks grew past the thousand mark (in 1991?), their further exponential growth made it clear that the manual curation of link semantics of any kind was hopelessly infeasible. Some 30 years hence, I'm surprised such windmills are still tilted at.
I like both Ted and the Media Lab. The work he did on Xanadu is amazing and heavily influenced the web. He can be goofy at times, but I think that goofyness is related to his ability to express thoughts and ideas others would dismiss. Today's goofy idea can become tomorrows serious truth.
no, it means that the 'kettle' is a hypocrite. There is another saying, 'practice what you preach'. Don't hold people to a higher standard than you hold yourself
> Don't hold people to a higher standard than you hold yourself
I disagree. Of course it's best to practice what you preach. But failing that, if you can't or won't reform yourself (and Ted obviously won't; old dog, new tricks, etc) being accurate in your criticism of other people is better than saying nothing, which in turn is better than defending the bad behavior of others.
Charlatans calling out other charlatans is a net good for society.
Except when it leads to endless criticism, with nobody actually getting their game together and doing something. It is very easy to criticize, and allowing people to criticize with nothing to show can very quickly discourage people from making any effort at all.
