HN Theater @HNTheaterMonth

It's a visionary hypertext project that doesn't really work yet, but the people behind it are happy to dispense snarky quotes about the how the web we all use is a poor substitute because it's a “bizarre structure created by arbitrary initiatives of varied people and it has a terrible programming language”.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu

Looks like this is their latest demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72M5kcnAL-4

The fact that they seem to be so interested in things like "who pays when you mix and match copyrighted content?" instead of "how do we get people to try out our system?" indicates that it's not going to be in widespread production use anytime soon...

⬐ leoc

> It's a visionary hypertext project that doesn't really work yet, but the people behind it are happy to dispense snarky quotes about the how the web we all use is a poor substitute because it's a “bizarre structure created by arbitrary initiatives of varied people and it has a terrible programming language”.

This is a bit like describing Galileo as "the jackass who wouldn't shut up about heliocentrism despite having no answer to the stellar parallax objection". By no means has he ever been right about everything, and he has been his own worst enemy in several ways, but ...

⬐ Animats

Yes. Everything is pay per view in Xanadu.

I knew that crowd when Autodesk was funding them. They were fanatical libertarians. The solution to everything is a market.

Ted Nelson was focused on text to the exclusion of images. That didn't help. He also had strong ideas about how the internal database should be organized, down to the database implementation level, which didn't help either, because they were 1960s database technology.[1]

The closest thing to Xanadu in wide use today is Github. One central place for all public code. Anything can be changed but the history and old versions remain. Full tracking of who changed what. The ability to create a completely new document from an old one while retaining tracking. There's no micropayment system, of course.

The real conceptual failure was not realizing that the future was ad-supported.

[1] http://dubinko.info/blog/2009/11/22/how-xanadu-works/

⬐ keithpeter

What was your perception of the internal dynamics of the group during the Autodesk phase? Did it strike you as effective/likely to produce something?

⬐ Animats

They had some really good people, but did seem to be spinning their wheels.

It was completely separate from Autodesk. Xanadu had offices on California Avenue in Palo Alto; Autodesk was in Marin County. Autodesk was quite good at getting working software out the door, but that didn't reach Xanadu.

Lack of an identified market was a big problem. One market that was considered was financial newsletters. There are lots of expensive newsletters you can buy which have extremely detailed coverage of something important to traders, such as what's happening at the Henry Hub or the Port of Rotterdam or in the Bahamas. These cost $50-$1000 a month. ("Offshore Alert", which covers scams run from tiny island countries, "Platts Oil Letter", which is now a big service, and the Dines Letter, for the gold bugs.) There was no centralized distribution for these, and they had tiny circulations. That didn't go anywhere. All of those are now on the Web as subscription products.

⬐ keithpeter

Interesting observation - so there was some consideration of a specific information market rather than the 'Kinko's for information' idea that Nelson has described in the Wired article.

It was more the development process that I was thinking of - the actual production of software, a working system. I take your point that Autodesk's programmers could certainly produce software. I was wondering if the Xanadu project was seen by Autodesk perhaps as a bit of a 'moon-shot', in the sense of low probability of success coupled with great potential.

⬐ Animats

I was wondering if the Xanadu project was seen by Autodesk perhaps as a bit of a 'moon-shot', in the sense of low probability of success coupled with great potential.

Yes, it was.

Autodesk has done a few of those. They were into virtual reality very early, before 1990. It turned out that doing CAD with gloves and goggles was like trying to paint wearing oven mitts. Precise positioning is tough. So they gave up on that.

Getting into 3D animation worked out better. Autodesk itself did 3D Studio, and gradually acquired other 3D animation companies as they got into trouble. This worked out well, and there was crossover with the CAD business. The really good radioiosity renderer from one of the animation programs was connected to an architectural design program. Now you could place real light fixtures from a library and see the result before building the building and embedding light fixtures in concrete.

Carl Bass, as CEO until last February, was into 3D printing. He thought home 3D printing was going to be a much bigger deal than it turned out to be. So Autodesk came out with several low-end CAD programs that were never very profitable and did a lot of work to make 3D printing easier. Not profitable. Bass is gone.

Autodesk keeps plugging away at boring but useful stuff. Market cap around $25 billion.

(I'm long out of Autodesk, although still a stockholder.)

⬐ tudorw

for a bit of context, this is the man who inspired the web, the web is such a beta your kids kids will be in hysterics when they learn what we thought we had... think programming a VHS circa 1988

⬐ mc42

Another interesting thing to view is the recently published video of his talk at Vintage Computer Festival East XI (1).

The idea of text being treated as paper makes perfect sense to me. Unfortunately, it can be incredibly messy to explain the concept to others. My best current analogy is citations linking paper to paper all at once. Without more software, or a better analogy, it's difficult to preach the merits to others.

I think this is a step in the right direction.

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dcfwLhDDMz4

⬐ None

None

⬐ None

None