Collective human consciousness is full of imagined or mythical dream-like utopias, hidden away behind mountains, across or under oceans, hidden in mist, or deep in the jungle. From Atlantis, Avalon, El Dorado, and Shangri-La, we have not stopped imagining these secret, fantastical places. One of these, Xanadu, is actually a real place but has been embellished over the years into a place of legend and myth, and thus became the namesake of an Internet we never got to see like all of those other mystical, hidden places.
The Xanadu project got its start in the 1960s at around the same time the mouse and what we might recognize as a modern computer user interface were created. At its core was hypertext with the ability to link not just other pages but references and files together into one network. It also had version control, rights management, bi-directional links, and a number of additional features that would be revolutionary even today. Another core feature was transclusion, a method for making sure that original authors were compensated when their work was linked. However, Xanadu was hampered by a number of issues including lack of funding, infighting among the project’s contributors, and the development of an almost cult-like devotion to the vision, not unlike some of today’s hype around generative AI. Surprisingly, despite these faults, the project received significant funding from Autodesk, but even with this support the project ultimately failed.
Instead of this robust, bi-directional web imagined as early as the 1960s, the Internet we know of today is the much simpler World Wide Web which has many features of Xanadu we recognize. Not only is it less complex to implement, it famously received institutional backing from CERN immediately rather than stagnating for decades. The article linked above contains a tremendous amount of detail around this story that’s worth checking out. For all its faults and lack of success, though, Xanadu is a interesting image of what the future of the past could have been like if just a few things had shaken out differently, and it will instead remain a mythical place like so many others.
I would never have connected Vannevar Bush and his memex with Doug Engelbart and his Mother of All Demos and Ted Nelson Computer Lib/Dream Machines
You might add Norman Abramson and ALOHAnet to the hardware side of this thread…clunky, kludgey, but it gave Robert Metcalfe the idea for Ethernet (and nobody uses yellow cable and vampire taps today).
They had the right ideas, at least partially, and were working with the technology available to them. Nothing wrong with that, and others took inspiration from them to get us where we are today. You have to crawl and walk before you can run.
Maybe this post should be called, “How we got to the Internet we have today”, because there are pieces of these ideas included in what we use now. Well, except for Bush’s mechanical Differential Analyzer, parts of which are at MIT and Smithsonian. When you didn’t have a computer you made a mechanical one.
(I still like Olivia Newton-John’s version better)
Yes, I’m with you about her version.
She was really cool.
Reading this was a bit of a horror (to me; the hyperlinked article).
I got an insight at toxic US American work/business mentality that I’d like to forget.
It’s beyond me how adult people couldn’t work together in a mature, respectful way.
I mean, they were so smart and educated here.
Yet same time, they couldn’t put their egos aside, grow a thicker skin, solve their differences and be a team.
Also, the deadline thing.. Why couldn’t they progress step-wise, at least?
I mean, I do understand perfectionism. I really do. But why not proceed on two fronts?
Finish one version to meet deadline and to save the project
and then finish the true, improved version when you have time?
But that’s just me. I don’t understand 1960s men, I’m afraid.
To me it was a generation of men that couldn’t cook for themselves or do the laundry.
They needed a wife as a mother replacement, basically.
It seemed like a generation that wasn’t mentally stable or self-reliant in some ways.
That would explain the childish outbursts to me.
Being one, it falls down to training or lack therein of. We aren’t so alike as you describe, my “liberated” mother would be aghast at the thoughts you proffer.
I remember reading praise for Xanadu in places like Wired and Mondo 2000 in the nineties, when print magazines were still a thing and the idea of something replacing the WWW was entirely plausible. But even then, it was talked about as a dead letter.
I think, more than anything, it was too rooted in the idea of media being centrally organized. The revelation with the web was that by having this (at the time) absurdly simple design, you got small-scale actors building out not only the content but the infrastructure itself. The web wasn’t just accessible to hobbyists, it literally put them on the same footing as Disney or CNN, and that’s where the explosive growth came from. Building out Xanadu would have depended on big organizations to get it rolling, as happened with radio and TV; but big media organizations were more interested in killing the internet until it was far too late.
It also can’t have helped that people had worked on this thing for decades without a serious attempt to launch it. You can only be the Next Big Thing for so long without showing some results. Not that I can think of any modern parallels on a global-economy-threatening scale.
To be fair, the internet wasn’t everything in 20th century.
There had been university databases and commercial databases that could be accessed via glass terminal over X.25.
Way back in mid-late 1970s, before the internet had started in 1983 or so.
The same technology was also used by banks and ATMs.
So even if the internet had never “made it” back then, a similar technology would have taken its place eventually.
Originally, the “internet” wasn’t one network but a network of networks, also.
Something that connects the individual networks with each others.
Internet=interconnected networks