Citizendia

This article is about the software system. For other uses, see Xanadu (disambiguation).

Project Xanadu was the first hypertext project. Founded in 1960 by Ted Nelson, the project contrasts its vision with that of paper: "Today's popular software simulates paper. Theodor Holm Nelson (born 1937 is an American Sociologist, Philosopher, and pioneer of Information technology. The World Wide Web (another imitation of paper) trivializes our original hypertext model with one-way ever-breaking links and no management of version or contents. "[1] Wired magazine called it the "longest-running vaporware story in the history of the computer industry". Wired is a full-color monthly American Magazine and on-line periodical published in San Francisco, California since March 1993 Vaporware is a somewhat derogatory term used to describe a Software or Hardware product that is announced by a developer well in advance of release but which then The first attempt at implementation began in 1960, but it wasn't until 1998 that an implementation (albeit incomplete) was released.

Contents

History

During his first year as a graduate student at Harvard, Nelson began implementing the system which contained the basic outline of what would become Project Xanadu: a word processor capable of storing multiple versions, and displaying the differences between these versions. Though he did not complete this implementation, a mockup of the system proved sufficient to inspire interest in others.

On top of this basic idea, Nelson wanted to facilitate nonsequential writing, in which the reader could choose his or her own path through an electronic document. He built upon this idea in a paper to the ACM in 1965, calling the new idea "zippered lists". The Association for Computing Machinery, or ACM, was founded in 1947 as the world's first scientific and educational Computing society These zippered lists would allow compound documents to be formed from pieces of other documents, a concept named transclusion. In Computer science, transclusion is the inclusion of part of a document into another document by reference In 1967, while working for Harcourt, Brace he named his project Xanadu, in honour of the poem "Kubla Khan" by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Harcourt Trade Publishers is a US Publishing firm with a long history of publishing fiction and nonfiction for children and adults Xanadu, also Zanadu, Shangdu, or Shang-tu ( was the Summer capital of Kublai Khan 's " Kubla Khan or a Vision in a Dream A Fragment " is a poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, which takes its title from the Mongol and Chinese Samuel Taylor Coleridge ( 21 October 1772 &ndash 25 July 1834) was an English Poet, Critic and philosopher

Ted Nelson published his ideas in his 1974 book Computer Lib/Dream Machines and the 1981 Literary Machines. Literary Machines is a book first published in the early 1980s by Ted Nelson.

Computer Lib/Dream Machines is written in a non-sequential fashion: it is a compilation of Nelson's thoughts about computing, among other topics, in no particular order. It contains two books, printed back to back, to be flipped between. Computer Lib contains Nelson's thoughts on topics which angered him, Dream Machines discusses his hopes for the potential of computers to assist the arts.

In 1972, Cal Daniels completed the first demonstration version of the Xanadu software on a computer Nelson had rented for the purpose, though Nelson soon ran out of money. In 1974, with the advent of computer networking, Nelson refined his thoughts about Xanadu into a centralised source of information, calling it a "docuverse".

In the summer of 1979, Nelson led the latest group of his followers, Roger Gregory, Mark Miller and Stuart Greene, to Swarthmore. Roger Everett Gregory is a US computer programmer technologist and scientist Mark S Miller is an American Computer scientist. He is known for his work as one of the participants in the 1979 hypertext project known as Project Xanadu; for inventing Swarthmore is a borough in Delaware County, Pennsylvania, United States. In a house rented by Gregory, they hashed out their ideas for Xanadu; but at the end of the summer the group went their separate ways. Miller and Gregory created an addressing system based on transfinite numbers which they called tumblers, which allowed any part of a file to be referenced. Transfinite numbers are Cardinal numbers or Ordinal numbers that are larger than all finite numbers yet not necessarily absolutely infinite.

The group continued their work, almost to the point of bankruptcy. In 1983, however, Nelson met John Walker, founder of Autodesk, at a conference for the people mentioned in Steven Levy's Hackers, and the group started working on Xanadu with Autodesk's financial backing. Autodesk Inc ( is an American Multinational corporation that focuses on 2D and 3D design Software for use in architecture engineering Steven Levy (born 1951 is an American Journalist who has written several books on computers technology Cryptography, the Internet cybersecurity Hackers Heroes of the Computer Revolution (ISBN 0-385-19195-2 is a Book by Steven Levy about the hacker culture.

According to economist Robin Hanson, in 1990 the first known corporate Prediction market was used at Xanadu. Robin Hanson (born 1959 is an associate Professor of Economics at George Mason University. Prediction markets are speculative markets created for the purpose of making predictions Employees and consultants used it for example to bet on the cold fusion controversy at the time. Cold fusion, sometimes called low energy nuclear reactions (LENR or condensed matter nuclear science, is a set of effects reported in controversial laboratory experiments

While at Autodesk, the group, lead by Gregory, completed a version of the software, written in the C programming language, though the software didn't work as well as they wanted. tags please moot on the talk page first! --> In Computing, C is a general-purpose cross-platform block structured However, this version of Xanadu was successfully demonstrated at the Hackers Conference and generated considerable interest. Then a newer group of programmers, hired from Xerox PARC, used the problems with this software as justification to rewrite the software in Smalltalk. PARC (Palo Alto Research Center Inc formerly Xerox PARC, is a Research and development company in Palo Alto California that began as a division of Smalltalk is an object-oriented, dynamically typed, reflective programming language. This effectively split the group into two factions, and the decision to rewrite put a deadline imposed by Autodesk out of the team's reach. A rewrite in Computer programming is the act or result of re-implementing a large portion of existing functionality without re-use of its Source code. In August 1992, Autodesk divested the Xanadu group, which became the Xanadu Operating Company, which struggled due to internal conflicts and lack of investment.

Charles S. Smith, the founder of a company called Memex (the name of the hypertext system designed by Vannevar Bush), hired many of the Xanadu programmers and licensed the Xanadu technology, though Memex soon faced financial difficulties, and the then-unpaid programmers left, taking the computers with them. The memex (a Portmanteau of "memory extender" is the name given by Vannevar Bush to the theoretical proto- Hypertext computer system he proposed Vannevar Bush ( March 11, 1890 &ndash June 30, 1974; pronounced "VAN-ee-var" ˈvæˌniː (The programmers were eventually paid. ) At around this time, Tim Berners-Lee was developing the World Wide Web. Sir Timothy John Berners-Lee OM KBE FRS FREng FRSA (born 8 June 1955 is an English computer scientist who is credited The World Wide Web (commonly shortened to the Web) is a system of interlinked Hypertext documents accessed via the Internet.

In 1998, Nelson released the source code to Xanadu as Project Udanax, in the hope that the techniques and algorithms used could help to overturn some software patents. Software patent does not have a universally accepted definition

In 2007, Project Xanadu released XanaduSpace 1.0.

Original 17 rules

  1. Every Xanadu server is uniquely and securely identified.
  2. Every Xanadu server can be operated independently or in a network.
  3. Every user is uniquely and securely identified.
  4. Every user can search, retrieve, create and store documents.
  5. Every document can consist of any number of parts each of which may be of any data type.
  6. Every document can contain links of any type including virtual copies ("transclusions") to any other document in the system accessible to its owner.
  7. Links are visible and can be followed from all endpoints.
  8. Permission to link to a document is explicitly granted by the act of publication.
  9. Every document can contain a royalty mechanism at any desired degree of granularity to ensure payment on any portion accessed, including virtual copies ("transclusions") of all or part of the document.
  10. Every document is uniquely and securely identified.
  11. Every document can have secure access controls.
  12. Every document can be rapidly searched, stored and retrieved without user knowledge of where it is physically stored.
  13. Every document is automatically moved to physical storage appropriate to its frequency of access from any given location.
  14. Every document is automatically stored redundantly to maintain availability even in case of a disaster.
  15. Every Xanadu service provider can charge their users at any rate they choose for the storage, retrieval and publishing of documents.
  16. Every transaction is secure and auditable only by the parties to that transaction.
  17. The Xanadu client-server communication protocol is an openly published standard. Third-party software development and integration is encouraged. [2]


See also

References

  1. ^ Project homepage
  2. ^ Xanadu FAQ: What requirements do Xanadu systems aim to meet?, 2002-04-12 by Andrew Pam

External links

© 2009 citizendia.org; parts available under the terms of GNU Free Documentation License, from http://en.wikipedia.org
 Dapyx Software network: MP3 Explorer | Ebook Manager | Zenithic