Week 4- Failed Project Alternate?

Week 4- Failed Project Alternate
Post #4

Failed Prediction: Project Xanadu

The Alternate? Reality

Another view
(from the Xanadu Australia official website: http://xanadu.com.au/ )
Ted Nelson thought up the whole thing in 1960, and has been speaking and publishing about the idea since 1965. In that year he also coined the terms "hypertext" and "hypermedia" for non-sequential writings and branching presentations of all types. (The term "interactive multimedia" seems to have become popular recently.)
Since that time there have been a long series of changing designs embodying these ideas:
1960:
Nelson's designs showed two screen windows connected by visible lines, pointing from parts of an object in one window to corresponding parts of an object in another window. No existing windowing software provides this facility even today.
1965:
Nelson's design concentrated on the single-user system and was based on "zipper lists", sequential lists of elements which could be linked sideways to other zipper lists for large non-sequential text structures.
1970:
Nelson invented certain data structures and algorithms called the "enfilade" which became the basis for much later work (proprietary to Xanadu Operating Company, Inc. until 24 August 1999)
1972:
Implementations ran in both Algol and Fortran.
1974:
William Barus extended the enfilade concept to handle interconnection.
1979:
Nelson assembled a new team (Roger Gregory, Mark Miller, Stuart Greene, Roland King and Eric Hill) to redesign the system.
1981:
K. Eric Drexler created a new data structure and algorithms for complex versioning and connection management.
The Project Xanadu team completed the design of a universal networking server for Xanadu, described in various editions of Ted Nelson's book "Literary Machines".
1983:
Xanadu Operating Company, Inc. (XOC, Inc.) was formed to complete development of the 1981 design.
1988:
XOC, Inc. was acquired by Autodesk, Inc. and amply funded, with offices in Palo Alto and later Mountainview California. Work continued with Mark Miller as chief designer.
The 1981 design (now called Xanadu 88.1) was topped off but Miller began a redesign. Xanadu 88.1 was not subjected to quality control or released as a product.
Dean Tribble and Ravi Pandya became co-designers and work on the redesign continued.
1989:
The World Wide Web, Hyper-G and Microcosm projects are initiated, all inspired or influenced by the Xanadu ideas.

1991:
The World Wide Web enters the mainstream public.
On August 6, 1991, Tim Berners-Lee posted a short summary of the World Wide Web project on the alt.hypertext newsgroup. This date also marked the debut of the Web as a publicly available service on the Internet.

1992:
Autodesk entered into the throes of an organizational shakeup and dropped the project, after expenditures on the order of five million US dollars. Rights to continued development of the XOC server were licensed to Memex, Inc. of Palo Alto, California and the trademark "Xanadu" was re-assigned to Nelson.
1993:
Nelson re-thought the whole thing and re-specified Xanadu publishing as a system of business arrangements. Minimal specifications for a publishing system were created under the name "Xanadu Light", and Andrew Pam of Serious Cybernetics in Melbourne, Australia was licensed to continue development as Xanadu Australia.
1994:
Nelson was invited to Japan and founded the Sapporo HyperLab. Memex changed their name to Filoli. SenseMedia became the second Xanadu licensee under the name of "Xanadu America".
1996:
Nelson became a Professor of Environmental Information at the Shonan Fujisawa Campus of Keio University. Initial draft of text transclusion proposal released.
1997:
Initial draft of OSMIC specifications released. Internet-Draft on Fine-grained Transclusion in HTML released. Transpublishing and transcopyright start to be used on the Web.
1998:
Nelson received his first award for his work on Xanadu and hypermedia, the 1998 Yuri Rubinsky Insight Foundation lifetime achievement award.
1999:
Open Source release of Xanadu 88.1 and 92.1 code under the names Udanax Green and Udanax Gold respectively.
2001:
Nelson awarded the medal and title of "Officier des Arts et Lettres" by the French Minister of Culture for his work on Xanadu and hypermedia.