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by bobajeff8 hours ago |
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upvoteby BirAdam2 hours ago|
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You’ll hear/read many people opining that it actually wasn’t a good idea.

I counter that it’s a great idea for many things. The problem is that something good enough and far cheaper is already all over the Earth: the web.

Just like Hurd and Minix might have technical merit that’d make them “better” than Linux, Linux is good enough and already here.

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upvoteby Analemma_8 hours ago|
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It's not a reality for a lack of trying. Multiple people have spent (literal!) lifetimes working on Xanadu and multiple businesses poured a great deal of money and effort into it way back in the day.

It continues to not be a thing because, even though the idea is superficially appealing to a certain engineer mind and that's why people get sucked into the cult, in reality it's not something anybody wants and it's solving a problem nobody has.

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upvoteby Animats7 hours ago|
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Right. I knew those people back when Autodesk owned Xanadu. The fundamental problem was that tracking and paying for text ownership and viewing down to the word level isn't really very useful. The Xanadu people were libertarians into micropayments. Everything is pay per view in Xanadu. Not cheap views, expensive ones, like Lexis/Nexis.

Also, they had no idea how to deal with either images or distributed systems.

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upvoteby kstrauser6 hours ago|
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> Also, they had no idea how to deal with either images or distributed systems.

What would make images harder than anything else? My naive self thinks, "hey, isn't that just one long base64-encoded word?" Apparently not, or they would've done it and moved on.

And why do you say that about distributed systems? What I've read of Xanadu (primarily the Wired article) made it sound like there'd be a relatively small number of commercial servers everyone else would subscribe to. Cue IBM's "five computers are enough" apocrypha. Is that what you mean?

I find everything about Xanadu fascinating, in kind of a slow-moving train crash sort of way, and would love hearing more bystander takes!

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upvoteby Animats2 hours ago|
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> What would make images harder than anything else?

Because diffs of image files are not very useful. Nelson's thing was very fine-grained tracking of who wrote what. That doesn't map well to images or video.

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upvoteby kstrauser1 hours ago|
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Ah, got it. That makes sense from what I casually know about the project.
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upvoteby kmeisthax23 minutes ago|
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I just finished writing a long rant on the other Project Xanadu related submission today where I specifically noted that Xanadu has a feature called a "permascroll" where everything you publish gets written into the permascroll and then transcluded into actual documents. This is a very "video editor" concept. Actually, the Xanadu model of transclusions and history would translate extremely well into nonlinear video editing; it's arguably better for video than it is for text.

Images wouldn't work unless you made a "Xanalogical image editor" that stores a list of edits and references to source images as you made or imported them. The tumbler number structure would have to be extended to include rectangular references into image files. It would work in theory, but in practice would probably bog down every computer that needed to load an image, and you'd get hit with shittons of fees for each one.

I can only imagine audio having to be stored as some kind of standardized DAW project file, with transcluded sample packs that would get you micro-transactioned for each one.

Man, this was a really silly idea...

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