Reading this makes me wish someone would really try to make Project Xanadu a reality. A network built on Content Addressable Storage and a Version Control System is some thing I'd really like to see invested in.
The spec was kept proprietary and patented until about 2019. All you had before that was ramblings by an eccentric character who was 100% sure he was correct.
> Bottom crums in the granfilade represent atoms. Atoms come in two varieties: characters and orgls. Character bottom crums are stored as spans of characters, rather than individual bytes. These consist of a pointer to a block of physical storage, either in core or on disk, containing the bytes themselves, and an (integer) length, telling the number of bytes in the block. Since each of these bytes has an implicit wid of 0.0.0.0.1, the character span has a wid of 0.0.0.0.〈number of characters in the span〉. Orgl bottom crums are stored in a similar fashion, but instead of literal data bytes, pointers to the fulcrums of orgls (poomfilades) are stored.
Was this jargon normal in 1984 because we hadn't invented words like "addresses" and "structs" yet?
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.
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.
A complex system cannot be "made" to work. It either works or it does not.
A simple system, designed from scratch, sometimes works.
Some complex systems actually work.
A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that works.
A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. One has to start over, beginning with a working simple system. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systemantics
> 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!
> 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.
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.
Huh, that 2nd to last article almost sounds like Amiga mod files. You pieced together samples, often, um, “borrowed” from other mods, into song-specific selection, then included a list of which samples to trigger at which frequency at which time. For example, you’d include one bass drum and one snare drum, and instructions on how to arrange them into rhythms.
Xanadu as a DAW might look a lot like that, except with explicit and documented reuse of another person’s samples.
Check out IPLD (the model that powers IPFS), which translates hash-linked DAGs and handles merkle DAGs (git) natively. There's been several attempts to build Xanadu'ish things on various types of networks, web2, web3, p2p, etc, but it just doesn't seem to be what the majority wants. Maybe someday...
