The curse of Xanadu

[gusl]

Interesting article from Wired on ADD-ish/absent-mindedness aspects of geekdom: The Curse of Xanadu

Xanadu, the ultimate hypertext information system, began as Ted Nelson's quest for personal liberation. The inventor's hummingbird mind and his inability to keep track of anything left him relatively helpless. He wanted to be a writer and a filmmaker, but he needed a way to avoid getting lost in the frantic multiplication of associations his brain produced. His great inspiration was to imagine a computer program that could keep track of all the divergent paths of his thinking and writing. To this concept of branching, nonlinear writing, Nelson gave the name hypertext.

Keyword: "aversion to finishing". It's surprising that Ted Nelson didn't invent the wiki.

Comments

[darius.livejournal.com]

Mark Miller once told me the only thing that article got correct was (as I remember it) some bit about a bowling alley.

[gustavolacerda.livejournal.com]

oh damn.

[dachte.livejournal.com]

I would credit Vannevar Bush for hypertext (and related topics) instead. I suspect you'll find his writings and ideas as interesting as I do.

A link... and a quote:

"The owner of the memex let us say, is interested in the origin and properties of the bow and arrow. Specifically he is studying why the short Turkish bow was apparently superior to the English long bow in the skirmishes of the Crusades. He has dozens of possibly pertinent books and articles in his memex. First he runs through an encyclopedia, finds an interesting but sketchy article, leaves it projected. Next, in a history, he finds another pertinent item, and ties the two together. Thus he goes, building a trail of many items. Occasionally he inserts a comment of his own, either linking it into the main trail or joining it by a side trail to a particular item. When it becomes evident that the elastic properties of available materials had a great deal to do with the bow, he branches off on a side trail which takes him through textbooks on elasticity and physical constants. He inserts a page of longhand analysis of his own. Thus he builds a trail of his interest through the maze of materials available to him."

[stepleton.livejournal.com]

Is there a more correct history with a similar level of detail?

[darius.livejournal.com]

Not that I know of. Nelson posted a lengthy rebuttal, but he's gotta be a biased source. I've met a few of the others (not Nelson) but generally talked about other things. (That includes the chat with MarkM and Dean Tribble mentioned above -- I didn't follow up on that remark.)

What I thought when the article came out was that it seemed to suffer from hindsight bias, at the least. I followed Xanadu at a distance back in the 80s and it was not obviously a loser, except for two challenges: people generally thought of a global hypertext network as science fiction and not super-important anyway, and Ted Nelson seemed to me like a prat for trying to keep such tight control, actively harming the chance of it working out. His later projects went the same way.