So do you have any ideas why Xanadu has been in stasis for so long?

What makes it such a disaster in my view is that even now, decades later, they still haven’t been able to decompose their vision into smaller, manageable, implementable pieces (or so I assume – otherwise they would’ve implemented them a long time ago, right?). This only begs the question: why is this the case? Surely it can’t be because the problem really is a monolithic block that can’t be taken apart?

And yes, I’m working from the stance that computer science research is only valuable when it produces results, whether in the form of artifacts, algorithms, or theorems. Not to sound too snarky, but ideas of unknown viability are a dime a dozen. :) Both Engelbart and Sutherland had prototypes that demonstrated the viability of what they proposed. I’m waiting for one from Nelson before I start taking him seriously.

At the same time, I don’t mean to give the impression that I think Nelson was right about everything. For example, he said that there would be no central directory, and instead people would have businesses that were competing directories. So far so good — we have Yahoo, and Google, and so forth. But what Nelson didn’t foresee was that statistical methods would clobber hand-creation of directories. That is, he didn’t foresee that we would search the web with Google much more often than we’d traverse Yahoo’s site categorization hierarchy.

As for the fact that people are still interested in pursuing Xanadu, I guess I just don’t see your point. There’s no giant Microsoft-style team working on Xanadu. Engelbart still uses NLS, Kay still pursues his Dynabook goals through Squeak. But, again, I sense this isn’t something we’re going to see eye-to-eye on.

I meant: nothing has come of their software. They’ve been writing it for decades now. Nothing, including Windows, takes that long. What happened? (Maybe something as simple as Spolsky-rant-inducing design mistakes, but who really knows?)

Some of the ideas were very interesting, and have been part of popular computing for some time now: hyperlinks, document versioning, even piecemeal data construction, as manifested in database-backed websites.

But some of their essential desiderata seem fundamentally flawed. Some flaws are technical – the fragment exchange and document versioning would require that all Xanadu servers make up a single global distributed database, and problems with distributed databases are legion (coherence issues, maintenance issues, etc).

And some are social. For example, the ability of anyone to link comments to anything anywhere. This would very quickly diverge into a kind of a global Wiki, along with all of the associated social problems. Worse yet, unbreakable links would mean that people can’t host their own content – the entire system would have to include measures that actively prevented authors from deleting old content. That strikes me as a hard sell. :)

Still, even with those problems, they declared neither defeat nor victory, and are still working on it. And perhaps that’s what’s most disheartening. There’s no sensible reason why a first release of any piece of software should take so long.

Sorry for the rant. :)

And, to give credit where it’s due, I seem to remember it was you, in a Williamsburg bar some years ago, who pointed out to me the importance of Negroponte’s contributions on an institutional level (and the surprising fact, even then, of how few institutions had followed).

Or do I misunderstand you?

As for Nelson, the personal story aspects of the Wired piece may be too mean, but I think their take on the project is right on. Why has nothing come of the man-eons put into the system? Surely it’s not the technology that’s holding him up – programming is always the easy part. The problems are conceptual, and they’re huge.

Yet certainly, as you observe, the move to create a degree called “media arts and sciences,” was obviously a positive development that very few institutions have been able to replicate, despite the obvious sense of it.

Nelson was relatively itinerant, making him an outsider in the Wired hyperreality of the Net as economic opporutnity. His essays on hypertext and non-linear reality articulate specific concepts rather clearly. While Computer Lib/Dream Machines has been unavailable, at least A Filesystem for the Complex, Changing, and Indeterminate is in the ACM DL.

While the work of both of these men has been influential, a competition seems off target. We don’t need to figure which leaders to follow. Just to keep developing concepts and making stuff.

(unless the point is to make an argument with a book publisher, in which case, yes, Computer Lib / Dream Machines should be in print on its own, in full.)

Nelson’s distinction between “hypermedia” and “facilities” is different from his distinction between human authorship and AI.

“Facilities” (as I read Nelson) are tools, rather than media. So this would include calculators, spreadsheets, etc. But this is also a distinction that’s becoming trickier as we get further from 1970. I guess it means that some web pages, for example, are hypermedia (interactive poems) — while others are facilities (online forms), and some might be both.

As for views of AI vs. authorship, I think on some level this debate is still alive. Nelson was arguing against a view that says, for example, “Let’s make a model of how learning really happens in the brain and then use that to determine what to show the student next.” He was arguing in favor of a view that says, for example, “Let’s think about the progression of this as a media experience and use our knowledge as authors and designers to decide what to show next.”

Times are different now, however; those magical “facilities” that the erstwhile AI mainstream (McCarthy et al.) had planned on never did materialize, and it has become difficult to defend any computer program as “not authored” by human beings, even if said program does generate new code it then works with (“co-authorship” or not? – but this should be discussed seperately…). The “magic” has evaporated; what’s left is AI as a medium, comparable to traditional media in content (examples: comparing the content of Cyc to that of the Encyclopedia Britannica; comparing the content of Façade to that of Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolfe), only different in interface. If I ever meet Ted Nelson, I’ll ask him if he thinks that the distinction between “hypertext” and “facilities” is still necessary today. Unless somebody beats me to it :-)

BTW, could I ask which work of Nelson’s it was you came upon recently?

Another, somewhat related question: can chatterbots be seen as an example for hypertext?

For example he [Gary Wolf, the author of "Curse"] very amusingly talks about us as if we are blundering hobbyists and says that computer scientists would not have agreed with us, therefore according to Wolf we were not computer scientists, right. He says of Roger Gregory, my good friend whom he impugned and was much nastier to than me, he says Roger Gregory was not an elite researcher or computer scientist. Yet a few paragraphs later he mentions that Roger had developed a new addressing scheme based on transfinite arithmetic. Now I do not know what Mr. Wolf means by computer science, but within my world, someone who invents an addressing scheme based on transfinite arithmetic is not stamp collecting. That’s computer science, or it was that week, and this is serious stuff.

An intense guy. As for comparing him with Negroponte, I think that Nelson (and Mondo) might have been too intense for the Nineties, where more pragmatical minded entities like Negroponte (and Wired) looked like they would win the world, or at least acted that way. Times change, though; I’ve not heard much of Negroponte lately, whereas Nelson sightings are seemingly reported from every corner of cyberspace ATM.