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by mmcdermott
865 days ago
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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. |
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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.