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Comment by djmips | Hacker News Reader

What's the real reason Xanadu failed to become the WWW?

I read a couple of Xanadu papers recently and my conclusion is that it failed to get big because it was mostly vaporware and when it finally delivered something it was much less than the press. The papers are interesting to read, but brilliant non-beings will always lose to more pedestrian beings. The story reminded me quite a bit of Chandler in "Dreaming in Code" by Scott Rosenberg.

Don't get me wrong, if you read Ted Nelson writing about Xanadu uncritically, you'll get a tale of utopia denied and genius tortured, but the reality seems much more prosaic.

Edit: I should also add that the web as originally built has real advantages over Xanadu. In order to implement its universal transclusion and DRM (yes, Xanadu had a scheme for DRM and micropayments to creators), Xanadu had to be centralized. I'd argue this is worse both socially and technologically. Adding DRM to the infrastructure of the web is something that I would really hate.

I was there (you'll find my name in the Wired article), and on the whole I would agree that Xanadu's reach far exceeded its grasp. Compared to the simplicity of the http protocol, Xanadu's complexity was high enough and its performance low enough that there was little opportunity for a genuine competition.

But I will say that Xanadu was conceptually not centralized; the peer-to-peer exchange of arbitrary information at scale was definitely part of the architecture. However, the major and systemic performance problems entirely prevented any scaling up of the system, which effectively means the distributed architecture was never proven.

I agree to a certain extent with the Chandler analogy, insofar as there was a lot of "architecture astronautics" that added complexity to the system beyond the ability of the team to manage -- especially given the limitations of early 1990s development machines.

One could refer to the article itself for Walker's own view of the sad outcome:

'Rather than push their product into the marketplace quickly, where it could compete, adapt, or die, the Xanadu programmers intended to produce their revolution ab initio.

'“When this process fails,” wrote Walker in his collection of documents from and about Autodesk, “and it always does, that doesn’t seem to weaken the belief in a design process which, in reality, is as bogus as astrology. It’s always a bad manager, problems with tools, etc.—precisely the unpredictable factors which make a priori design impossible in the first place.”'

He wasn't wrong. Xanadu tried to leap fully formed into the world as a megalithic architecture capable of arbitrarily large data structures supporting arbitrarily small comparisons and transclusions, and it couldn't compete with HTTP's fully open specification and implementations, low barrier to entry, and extreme simplicity.

I appreciate the boots-on-the-ground perspective, so thanks for posting! I do want to be clear that I do appreciate the research and enjoy reading the papers produced by Xanadu. My goal was never to belittle the project itself, just talk about reasons for history playing out as it did.

No worries, I didn't interpret your comment as belittlement. I agree the project was over-ambitious and overly complex, but it was also visionary and influential.

"In order to implement its universal transclusion and DRM (yes, Xanadu had a scheme for DRM and micropayments to creators), Xanadu had to be centralized."

Fallback positions from the idealized "roadmap" are what happens when VCs get involved with a system that offers that Zero To One advantage -- but you have to have a One to offer the VCs, which Memex didn't. The question then becomes how much of your road map can be recovered or, perhaps more to the point, do you even _want_ to recover in the light of ground truth experience? At present there is a lot of potential for Information Centric Networking that would be more likely realized in a Ship-Dumbed-Down-Decentralized-Xanadu1994 alternative universe than is likely to be realized now.

One man's vaporware is another man's roadmap. Think about it like this:

Why was Brendan Eich under such pressure from VCs to throw together a scripting language over a weekend?

Not "from VCs". Marc was not a VC then, Netscape's investors didn't direct any of our strategic or tactical moves. Bill Joy at Sun also supported JS as scripting language for Java, and signed the trademark license. Excerpt on the early days and why we did JS (part of 3 hour Lex Fridman interview):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S0ZWtsYyX8E

HOPL paper: https://hopl4.sigplan.org/details/hopl-4-papers/10/JavaScrip...

I stand corrected (and also note the "weekend" was really 10 days). Jim Clark* apparently gave Marc Andreessen the necessary latitude.

* The other person with an office opening into Keith's work area at Memex was Ron Resch https://www.historyofcg.com/pages/university-of-utah/

1994: In the next room from me at Memex Corp. poor Keith Henson was draped over a chair (due to a bad back) working, alone, on the C++ Xanadu code to debug garbage collection among other things, because the original Smalltalk source had been lost. Memex Corp. was early enough in HTTP's development of lock-in network effects, that its acquisition of Xanadu _might_ yet have turned the tide. Why had the Smalltalk code been lost? Well, all I can tell you as that from my work with Roger (starting in 1996 on a rocket engine) that my understanding of events differs from that reported in Wired (and most others including, to some extent, Roger himself) and involves some pretty, shall we say, "bad behavior" on the part of certain parties that were more than a little partial to C++. Since this is hearsay, I won't go into more depth stating things "as fact". But it is pretty clear to me that the effort and investment put into making HTML, JS, etc. de facto standards, combined with Memex's acquisition of Xanadu rights (and potential willingness to open up the Xanadu protocols and implementation) at that critical juncture was fatally hampered by the C++-only handicap suffered by the Xanadu source.

Why didn't I step in and help poor Keith? Ever heard of Croquet's TeaTime?

https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/1094855.1094861

I was in a position to resurrect at least _that_ much of the original work I'd one at Viewtron Corp. of America based on David P. Reed's PhD thesis, and Reed was just down the street from us at Interval Research at that time, which rather tempted me away from helping Keith, even if I'd been authorized to do so, which I wasn't.

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