An Engineer’s Guide to the Docuverse
Project Xanadu® is the original hypertext project — the brainchild of Ted Nelson, and the result of careful and passionate work by innumerable clever people over the course of nearly sixty years. Because of the length of its development period, the project has spawned and used many ideas of varying importance, and particularly important ideas have had many names. Because its history spans several eras of computing, ideas spawned by the project that were once considered radical have become commonplace and other ideas that were once commonplace have become forgotten and become radical again. Over this time, most documentation available to the public has been written by Ted, and intended for a non-technical or semi-technical audience.
I had the opportunity to work on Xanadu for five or six years, after spending years as a fan, trying to piece together a general idea of the project from scattered documentation. This gave me the privilege of being able to ask Ted for clarification on both technical and philosophical points, and it also gave me a better view of how different ideas and terms fit into different eras.
Xanadu has a poor reputation in many technical communities. Part of this is due to the popularity of a misleading and in parts factually incorrect 1995 Wired article about the project. However, I consider a larger issue to be the project’s tendency (normal through the 1980s but now very strange) to default to secrecy (even with regard to ostensibly non-secret ideas) and…
