The Index:
1. Internet Before World Wide Web
Internet before World Wide Web - The First 130 Years: Atlantic cable, Sputnick, ARPANET,"Information Superhighway", ...
2. World Wide Web as a Side Effect of Particle Physics Experiments.
World Wide Web was born in CERN: the most impressive results of large scale scientific efforts appeared far away from the main directions of those efforts
3. Next Crossroad of World Wide Web History
World Wide Web as a NextStep of PC Revolution ... from Steven P. Jobs to Tim Berners-Lee
4. Birth of the World Wide Web, Browser Wars, ...
Birth of the Web, Tim Berners-Lee, R. Cailliau, Marc Andreessen, Browser Wars, ...
5. Early History of Hypertext
Hypertext Foundation of the World Wide Web: Vannevar Bush's hyperlink concept, Ted Nelson coins the word Hypertext, ...
6. "Living History" of Hypertext.
Hypertext Saga of Theodor Holm Nelson: The Fate of Thinking Person in Silicon Valley ...
7. "Xanadu" Plan
The Nelson's Xanadu Plan to build a better World Wide Web
8. Growth of the Internet: Statistics
Statistics of the Internet & Worl Wide Web: Hosts, Domains, WebSites, Traffic, ...
9. Conclusion
What is the nature of World Wide Web?
10 Prehistory of the Internet
The Ancient Roads of Telecommunications & Computers
11 They said it ...
People Wrote About This Book

 

History of the Internet. We all need it. We all want it. But how did it happen in the first place? Gregory Gromov provides a ... comprehensive ... history of the Worldwide Web before it was the Net we all know and love. By Matthew Holt. 

 NetworkWorld. June, 1997

____ 

For a history of the Internet readers should consult Gregory Gromov's The Roads and Crossroads of the Internet's History.

Humanities Computing Unit of Oxford University,
Oxford University,  UK

___

The Roads and Crossroads of the Internet's History. By Gregory R. Gromov. A critically acclaimed site for a comprehensive history of the Internet.

The University of Texas, System Digital Library.

____

Gregory  Gromov provides an impressionistic overview in "The Roads and Crossroads of Internet's History," ... with a particular concentration on the development of  hypertext and the Web.

Current  literature of the online community   by Eron Main, Faculty of Information Studies, 

University of Toronto, Canada 

____

The Roads and Crossroads of Internet History by Gregory Gromov ... can be a great resource where an informed ‘Net surfer can come and let hypertext do the walking and the inventors of the ‘Net themselves do the talking.

by Kelly Ward, Public Health Library, 
University of California, Berkeley

____

Gregory R. Gromov’s The Roads and Crossroads of Internet History is probably the history that most students will enjoy as it is sprinkled liberally with files that illustrate his points.

Commencing with Internet pre-history work your way through 9 sections to read about the web, browser wars, and Xanadu to name a few topics. It is a long essay but extremely interesting.

The Australian National University. Faculty of Art,  Canberra

____


... This is a hypertext ... It is written as a kind of mosaic rather than as a straight narrative, including email questions and answers, fragments of interviews, and the like. It focuses primarily on the Web and hypertext over the Internet.

by  M. C. Morgan  College of Arts and Letters, 

Bemidji State University, MN, USA

____

This is an entertaining (if potentially  confusing) account of Net history, part of a large on-line hyperbook ...  this site will provide some fascinating insights and connections between events and people.

Open Learning Agency : learning resources to support the K-12 education system in British Columbia, Canada

___

The Roads and Crossroads of Internet 's History by Gregory R. Gromov... is an excellent history of the internet and a good example of a "web document." ... You also should experience what "hypertext" is and why this experience is more like exploring than reading...

by Robert Melczarek  Introduction for EDU 606  School of Education
Troy State University, Dothan. USA

___

The Roads and Crossroads of Internet History - Gregory Gromov's comprehensive and fascinating overview of the philosophy and history of the Internet.

Cource  STS 3700B 6.0: “History of Computing and Information Technolog” by Luigi M Bianchi. School of Analitical Studies & Information Technology. Science and Technology Studies

York University, Canada

____


Finally, an entertaining and eye-catching approach to Internet history is Gregory R. Gromov's History of Internet and WWW: The Roads and Crossroads of Internet History. This site is worth visiting, as much for its unorthodox approach using dazzling visuals and hypertext style as its content. By Deborah Husted Koshinsky and Rick McRae, University Libraries

State University of New York at Buffalo

____

The Roads and Crossroads of Internet History by Gregory Gromov  ...  possibly not the first place in the pool where a non-swimmer should take the plunge, this colorful and quirky site can be a great resource where an informed ‘Net surfer can come and let hypertext do the walking and the inventors of the ‘Net themselves do the talking.

"Nettalk : A Brief History of the 'Net" by Kelly Ward

The Bulletin. Special Libraries Association, San Francisco Bay region. The School of Information Management and Systems (SIMS) -- a graduate program at the University of California, Berkeley.

___


This is one of the Great Classic Websites. It's a history of the Internet and what led up to it, told in hypertext, both eloquently and chaotically, as strange in its own way as the Mel Brooks movie, History of the World, Part One. But it's one [REDACTED} of a lot more accurate than the Brooks movie. All Internet users, even those of you who just signed up for Web-TV or AOL last week and are still fumbling around, should check out this site.

When you jump into this online story, make sure you have a couple of hours free. It takes that long to read. Imagine a collaborative writing  project that tells you more than you ever wanted to know (and more than probably thought there was to tell) about the Internet, starting with the laying of the first telegraph cable across the Atlantic in 1858 (which was NOT a success, BTW).

You'll learn why the WWW Consortium [W3C] is based at a physics lab in Switzerland called CERN, instead of at a computer research center where you'd logically expect it to be, and why CERN doesn't even stand for the lab's real name -- in either English or French, along with lots of other neat factoids that'll come in handy if you ever find yourself playing Trivial Pursuit: The Internet Edition.

by  Robin Miller
Best High-Tech Sights on the Net

__

 For anyone who has ever wondered how and why the Internet was created comes this extensive essay,  "The Roads and Crossroads of Internet's History." With this document, users can follow the development of the Net from its early stages as a military communication system to the multimedia extravaganza we know today.

Cource Education 2751: "Power and Communication Technology" by Bridget A. Ricketts

Prince of Wales Collegiate, Newfoundland Canada

__

Gregory R. Gromov's version is a fun to read and thoughtful look into the history of the Internet and the WWW.

USM - Professional Development Center
The Maine Science and Technology Foundation. USA

___


an excellent 9-part review of the Internet's history and its relationship with the information revolution . Very informative and quite amusing at times too!

CADVision Development Corporation. USA

 
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Roads and Crossroads of the Internet History
            by Gregory Gromov

               Click here to download a mobile friendly .PDF version of this History.


 
prev     Chapter #7 - Plan "Xanadu"next_

 
 

The Xanadu Plan

"I was right for some wrong reasons or whether I was right,  ..."

Ted Nelson, Wired, 3.09

 

 

The best way to predict the future is to invent it
Peter Cochrane, British Telecom Laboratories



"Explaining it Quickly", by Ted Nelson

The   "Xanadu: The Information Future"  that  was compiled from the writings of Ted Nelson by Katherine Phelps of Xanadu Australia

 

The   Xanadu in some more detail:

    The Xanadu database makes it possible to address any substring of any document from any other document.

    This requires an even stronger addressing scheme than the Universal Resource Locators used in the World-Wide Web.

    Every single byte (character) in every document (in the whole world) needs a unique address.

    Xanadu will never  delete any text.

    It keeps a permanent record of all versions of every document. This is necessary because someone may have created links to parts of a specific version of a document, which may no longer be present in later versions of that document.

    Xanadu uses a sophisticated versioning system that requires only one version (the current one) of a document to be stored completely. By keeping a record of the changes made to the document, other versions can be generated on the fly.
    Ted Nelson and Xanadu, by Paul De Bra

     

    After all as it can be seen below the Xanadu promised basic solution of the currently most popular  Broken Link's problem  ("...error 404") and more...


Where World WideWeb Went Wrong
by Andrew Pam"

    Lack of transparent support for mirroring
    Lack of an underlying distributed file system
    Lack of bivisibility and bifollowability
    Lack of versioning and alternates
    Limited support for metadata
    Limited support for Computer Mediated Communication Cyberspace/"Hyperspace" as a pervasive user interface metaphor
    Limited support for transclusions
    Transcopyright - the Xanadu solution for business on the Net - New financial instruments for the new media

     

    Nelson: Trying to fix HTML is like trying to graft arms and legs onto hamburger...

    "The problem is how to clean up the mess that is
    strewn around us.... We have the World Wide
    Web with all sorts of marvelous new conceptual
    methods proposed every month, all of them
    contradictory," said Nelson.

    "I come from a slightly different position [than the
    Web], where we have long presented and
    implemented an integrated solution for all of these
    problems in parallel, which will eventually prevail
    once people understand it," Nelson said.

    Hypertext Guru Has New Spin on Old Plans, Wired, 17.Apr.98.by James Glave




    Xanadu Timeline:

    1960 Ted Nelson's designs showed two screen windows connected by visible lines, pointing from parts of an object in one window to corresponding parts of an object in another window. No existing windowing software provides this facility even today.

    1965 Nelson's design concentrated on the single-user system and was based on "zipper lists", sequential lists of elements which could be linked sideways to other zipper lists for large non-sequential text structures.

    1970 Nelson invented certain data structures and algorithms called the "enfilade" which became the basis for much later work (still proprietary to Xanadu Operating Company, Inc.)

    1972 Implementations ran in both Algol and Fortran.

    1974 William Barus extended the enfilade concept to handle interconnection.

    1979 Nelson assembled a new team (Roger Gregory, Mark Miller, Stuart Greene, Roland King and Eric Hill) to redesign the system.

    1981K. Eric Drexler created a new data structure and algorithms for complex versioning and connection management.

      The Project Xanadu team completed the design of a universal networking server for Xanadu, described in various editions of Ted Nelson's book "Literary Machines" ...

    1983Xanadu Operating Company, Inc. (XOC, Inc.) was formed to complete development of the 1981 design.

    1988XOC, Inc. was acquired by Autodesk, Inc. and amply funded, with offices in Palo Alto and later Mountain View California. Work continued with Mark Miller as chief designer. ..

    1992 Autodesk entered into the throes of an organisational shakeup and dropped the project, after expenditures on the order of five million US dollars. Rights to continued development of the XOC server were licensed to Memex, Inc. of Palo Alto, California and the trademark "Xanadu" was re-assigned to Nelson.

    1993 Nelson re-thought the whole thing and respecified Xanadu publishing as a system of business arrangements. Minimal specifications for a publishing system were created under the name "Xanadu Light", and Andrew Pam of Serious Cybernetics in Melbourne, Australia was licensed to continue development as Xanadu Australia.

    1994 Nelson was invited to Japan and founded the Sapporo HyperLab...

      By Andrew Pam, Xanadu Australia

       

...epic tragedy:

    It was the most radical computer dream of the hacker era.

    Ted Nelson's Xanadu project was supposed to be the universal, democratic hypertext library that would help human life evolve into an entirely new form.

    Instead, it sucked Nelson and his intrepid band of true believers into what became the longest-running vaporware project in the history of computing -

    a 30-year saga of rabid prototyping and heart-slashing despair.
    The amazing epic tragedy.

    The Curse of Xanadu, Wired 3.06, 1995,  by Gary Wolf

     

Wolf calls the general idea that we need freedom and availability of information to avoid disaster a "very hackerish assumption." Perhaps. But it is an ideal I believe in, bound up with the ideals I learned from the Pledge
of Allegiance in grade school. Ironically, that ideal seemed to be what Wired stood for. Wolf's piece is a perfect example of such a disaster.

    Ted Nelson,Wired, 3.09

     

Nelson and his colleagues of Project Xanadu pioneered in issues of distributed hypermedia, distributed documents and evolving edit systems. It can be argued that HyperCard, World Wide Web, Lotus Notes and much of "multimedia" all derive from this work.

Nelson's theories of software center around arbitrary Virtuality, which he divides into conceptual structure and feel. He condemns "metaphors" as presently used, and instead advocates the design of deep new construct logics

    Ted Nelson, Be-In, 1996

     

     

    I continue to hold exactly to my original vision, that transclusive hypermedia will be the publishing medium of the future, under whatever brand name.

    There are far more varieties of interactive media than anyone has yet tried; but I believe that open transmedia - unique in power to aid understanding and to solve the copyright issue - represents a vital singularity in the great family of media cosmologies; until this is disproven,
    I continue to stake my life and career on it. If I am right about the centrality of transclusion to the media of the future, it may all have been worth it, and we will see who understood media design after all.

    Ted Nelson, Wired, 3.09

     

    One profound insight can be extracted from the long and sometimes painful Xanadu story: the most powerful results often come from constraining ambition and designing only microstandards on top of which a rich exploration of applications and concepts can be supported.

That's what has driven the Web and its underlying infrastructure, the Internet.

    Xanks and No, Xanks, Wired, 3.09 , by Vint Cerf

     

 
prev      Chapter #7 - Plan "Xanadu" next_
The Index:
1. Internet Before World Wide Web
Internet before World Wide Web - The First 130 Years: Atlantic cable, Sputnick, ARPANET,"Information Superhighway", ...
2. World Wide Web as a Side Effect of Particle Physics Experiments.
World Wide Web was born in CERN: the most impressive results of large scale scientific efforts appeared far away from the main directions of those efforts
3. Next Crossroad of World Wide Web History
World Wide Web as a NextStep of PC Revolution ... from Steven P. Jobs to Tim Berners-Lee
4. Birth of the World Wide Web, Browser Wars, ...
Birth of the Web, Tim Berners-Lee, R. Cailliau, Marc Andreessen, Browser Wars, ...
5. Early History of Hypertext
Hypertext Foundation of the World Wide Web: Vannevar Bush's hyperlink concept, Ted Nelson coins the word Hypertext, ...
6. "Living History" of Hypertext.
Hypertext Saga of Theodor Holm Nelson: The Fate of Thinking Person in Silicon Valley ...
7. "Xanadu" Plan
The Nelson's Xanadu Plan to build a better World Wide Web
8. Growth of the Internet: Statistics
Statistics of the Internet & Worl Wide Web: Hosts, Domains, WebSites, Traffic, ...
9. Conclusion
What is the nature of World Wide Web?
10 Prehistory of the Internet
The Ancient Roads of Telecommunications & Computers
11 They said it ...
People Wrote About This Book

Silicon Valley News


  Internet History & World Wide Web, Chapter # 7 http://www.netvalley.com/cgi-bin/intval/net_history.pl?chapter=7

Copyright © 1995-2011 Gregory Gromov
 
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