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by antipax 5011 days ago
Read these rules for the Xanadu project: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu#Original_17_rule...

and to me, at least, it becomes very clear why the WWW won the race.

1 comments

Yup, he was very widely cited (along with Vannevar Bush) back in the '80s when people were playing a lot with this sort of thing, but almost everything he actually tried to create seemed hopelessly baroque and over-engineered.

"Simple" is a very important concept in the real world, and what he churned out was anything but.

[I recall his book "Computer Lib" as being almost completely unreadable too, and remember thinking that he must have doing drugs when he wrote it...]