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"...
think upon patience .
Pray you, gentlmen."
Shakespear, All's well that ends well, Act 3, Scene 2
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The "Living History" of
Hypertext.
Nelson's life is so full of unfinished
projects that it might fairly be said to be built from them, much as lace is
built from holes or Philip Johnson's glass
house from windows...
He has been at work on an overarching philosophy of everything
called General Schematics, but the text remains in thousands of pieces, scattered
on sheets of paper, file cards, and sticky notes. Curse of Xanadu,
by Gary Wolf
Theodor Holm
Nelson |
The Fate of Thinking Person in Silicon Valley |
1960. It occurs to me that the future of humanity is at
the interactive computer screen, that the new writing and movies will be interactive
and interlinked. It will be united by bridges of transclusion (see below) and we need a world-wide
network to deliver it with royalty. I begin.
. . . . .
February, 1988. Autodesk buys the Xanadu
project, which has been bundled into XOC, Inc. Nelson gives up the trademark.
LATE 1988 the program designed in 1981 is finished (and dubbed
88.1), then set aside, to begin work on a MUCH FINER design-
August, 1992. Autodesk drops the project and
gives us carfare. Our heroes find themselves out in the street.
Interesting TimesNumber
Three, October 1994,
Theodor Holm Nelson , Mindful Press, 1994
Japanese Embrace |
After a Years Failure
in U.S., |
A Man Too Eccentric For Silicon Valley |
Theodor Nelson
Continues His Quest for Xanadu
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SAPPORO, Japan - Eagger to inspire a creative new generation of computer programmers,
Japan hax turned to a U.S. software guru who has been called "one of
the great minds of the 20th century" and "the Orson Welles of software."
So far, it hardly matters that the individual in question, Theodor Holm Nelson, has
been called those things by himself . Or that in U.S. he has spent more than
30 years and large sums of other people's money on never finished Xanadu,
which has bankrupted one group of programmers and overhelmed several others.
For Japan has accorded Mr. Nelson a hero's welcom. A group of electronics giants,
including Hitachi Ltd. and Futjitsu Ltd., built a 12-person software lab for him on
Japan's northernmost island and named it Hyperlab, where he dreamed, desighed and
philosophed for a year and half. More recenrtly Keo University has given him a research
appointment at its campus near Tokyo, where he plans to continue building Xanadu
with companies or students who care to help.
In Japan, many still revere Mr. Nelson for his 1965 "hypertext"
concept -- essentially the system that allows users of the Internet's WorldWideWeb
to mouse-click their way from words or pictures in one document to those in another.
"He is {part of] the living
history of the computer world,"...
By David P. Hamilton, WSJ, April 24, 1996,
p 1, A10.
"...after the Advisory Committee
meeting of the WWW Consortium, in Tokyo, June 1997. This one (photo -- GRG)
was made by Hakon Lie at dinner.
It shows me (Robert Cailliau ),
sitting between Tim Berners-Lee and Ted Nelson.
Tim and Ted are
clearly engaged in a serious debate about some hypertext
phenomenon behind my back, while I'm discussing
philosophy with
Hakon, who was
sitting opposite me and took the photo." by R. Cailliau
"Tim,
Robert and Ted
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Theodor Holm Nelson
A
retort to Gary Wolf's "Curse of Xanadu" in Wired
Magazine.
Magazine:
Nelson's response to the Web was "nice try."
Nelson: This is a pretty seriously out-of-context
quote.
Magazine: Today, with the advent of far more powerful memory devices, Xanadu, the grandest encyclopedic project of our era,
seemed not only a failure but an actual symptom
of madness.
Nelson: I find this both gratuitously nasty and incomprehensible.
They do not change the problem or invalidate the proposed
solution of transclusive media.
Transclusions
by Andrew Pam
"Transclusion" is a term introduced by Ted Nelson
to define virtual inclusion, the process of including something by reference
rather than by copying.
This is fundamental to the Xanadu designs; originally transclusions
were implemented using hyperlinks, but it was later discovered that in fact hyperlinks
could be implemented using transclusions!
Transclusions permit storage efficiency for multiple reasonably similar documents,
such as those generated by versions and alternates as discussed above.
WWW currently permits images to be transcluded using the IMG - tag,
but strangely does not support any other media types.
Some support for text transclusion has been added in the form of a "server
side include" facility in some WWW servers, but this is a work-around with
limited use.
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Prehistory |
Internet
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CERN |
Next Step |
Birth of Web |
Hypertext |
Living History |
Xanadu |
Stats |
Conclusion
The Index:
Prehistory of the Internet
Internet Before
World Wide Web
World Wide Web
as a Side Effect of Particle Physics Experiments.
Next
Crossroad of World Wide Web History
Birth of the
World Wide Web
Early History of
Hypertext
"Living
History" of Hypertext.
Xanadu Plan
Growth of the
Internet: Statistics
Conclusion
Suggestions, thoughts, questions?
Contact us...
Copyright ©1995-2011
Gregory
Gromov
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