The Project Xanadu | Ted Nelson | 1960

A new kind of writing with parallel pages and documents visibly connected.

1970 Xerox PARC > "How can we imitate paper?", conventional electronic documents, Microsoft Word and PDF, imitate paper and emphasize appearence of fonts. First 'modern' interface Alto, limitated by Windows and Macintosh then Linux.

1960 Xanadu project > paper as a prison "How can we IMPROVE on paper?", new screen literature of parallel, interconnected documents. Visible connection between two links as structural part of the writing, generalized way of representing parallel documents and their precise connection (impossibile on OS and web). The web (Tim Berners-Lee) used the concept of 'hyperlink' from this project (jump-link) leaving out the visible interconnections which makes visible where you are going. Need of a rational and extensible structure behind the visible connection, a way of grouping parallel documents and managing their visible interconnections, that is defined by the data structure. >> Redefine the nature of reading and writing through a radically new media.

Concepts

marglinal notes
multi-parallelism
transclusion
deep link (original hyperlink)
floating link (flink)
origin of content
generalized media format

Working prototypes

1999 Ka-Ping Yee - Pyxi, connected to the Xanadu Green server (Roger Gregory)
2003 Ian Heath - CosmicBook
2007 Adamson Smith - XanaduSpace, 3D [1]
2014 Nicholas Levin - OpenXanadu
2016 Xanadocs [2]

1972 As we will think