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Comment by adamnemecek | Hacker News Reader

Can someone recommend a book that would talk about all this stuff in more detail? By all this stuff, I guess I mean all the dreams about personal computing that never came to fruition. Ideally with little fluff and a lot of technical detail.

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Ted's book is fantastic, Computer Lib and Dream Machines.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Lib_/_Dream_Machines

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Computer-Lib-Dream-Machines-Tempus/d...

Technical description of Xanadu is buried in places like

http://transliterature.org/

http://www.xanadu.com.au/ted/XUsurvey/xuDation.html

http://xanadu.com/xanasimp

(See also http://hyperland.com/TedCompOneLiners and http://hyperland.com/mlawLeast.html for overview/philosophy and http://hyperland.com/mlawLeast.html for some links.)

EDIT: And there's another book, Literary Machines http://www.worldcat.org/title/literary-machines/oclc/4017610... but good luck finding a cheap copy.

Thanks for filling out the technical side :) Here's Ted showing ZigZag, just because;

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WEj9vqVvHPc

If only it'd be re-released (and preferably as epub or something) -- but just a straight reprint would be great. It's pretty hard to get hold of!

"What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry" (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0143036769/ref=as_li_ss_tl?...) covers the story in great detail.

It's not a book I recommend this article http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/3.06/xanadu.html about Ted Nelson and Xanadu. Entertaining reading.

The Curse of Xanadu By Gary Wolf

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.

Nelson was furious about the article and believed it had misrepresented him and Xanadu, evidently with some reason: http://web.archive.org/web/20001101230424/http://www2.educ.k...

Thank you, thank you! I had always hoped there would be some kind of follow-up to the Wired article.

And some more detail: http://web.archive.org/web/20001003011753/http://xanadu.com....

Vaporware might be too strong a description, but an "amazing epic tragedy" that chewed up three decades of very smart people's effort is correct, from what I've heard from a friend who looked at what they produced.

Besides taking way way too long, as not uncommon in stealth mode projects they failed make sure their system was end to end usable. My fried said trying to make a browser/viewer/whatever for Xanadu required using an API that was impossibly complicated, and while I don't remember the specifics now, he cited them in detail.

There used to be some kind of implementation (a mock-up, really) on-line with a text one could zoom out and in and surf from "things" to "things" but I can't find it anymore.

Not quite all the same stuff, but I recommend Waldrop’s book The Dream Machine: J.C.R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal.

This NLS screencast from 2006 http://vimeo.com/81336768 is probably a decent starting point.

Another suggestion that's not a book:

Ted Nelson made a bunch of videos [0] recently telling his story. Not a lot of technical details, but I found it enlightening nonetheless.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLTI2Kz0V2OFlgbkROVmzk...

Dealers of Lightening (http://www.amazon.com/Dealers-Lightning-Xerox-PARC-Computer/...) is a great book about the contributions and founding of Xerox PARC.

Also, when Alan Kay said they structured the research like baseball what did he mean? Maybe something about not hitting a home run every time?

not sure if there's a book, but what I can see all this while, PARC produce a lot of awesome things that never reach their full potential, even now

If there's anyone out there with enough knowledge of this stuff, I'd happily fund a Kickstarter project to get a book written.

Samesies.

It is so important that something like this happens. The mental image of all the knowledge workers of the world riding tricycles because a real bike is "too difficult", is absolutely perfect.

What about links? Does anyone have links to similar material of high quality? Here's the original As We May Think : http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-ma...

I've linked Engelbart's site http://www.dougengelbart.org/ is here, the Sketchpad thesis http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/techreports/UCAM-CL-TR-574.pdf is here. There's lots more stuff if you search the academic literature carefully.

I have enough knowledge of this material to write two books on this subject. I'd love to write it, I maybe have three chapters written already. With some effort we could even include some demo's of these systems (see my hn profile for my email).

"Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age" is pretty good:

http://www.amazon.com/Dealers-Lightning-Xerox-PARC-Computer/...

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