[jabowery]

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.