Recently, I’ve been researching “alternative forms” of the Internet for a sci-fi project I’m working on. In my research, I came across something known as “Project Xanadu” which was an early and never-implemented predecessor to the World Wide Web. From what I’ve gathered, Project Xanadu was kinda like a wikipedia-style repository of data but on a much larger scale. Likewise, I haven’t been able to deduce what exactly PX was and how it worked compared to the WWW based on the articles I’ve read on it. It seems very esoteric.
I’m wondering if it would be possible for someone to explain it to me like I’m 5, perhaps using analogies?
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
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Given how Project Xanadu was never implemented outside some basic proof of concept work, it’s hard to say how it would compare to the modern internet. Especially considering how the open nature of the system would behave with adversarial, hostile actors in every corner. From all accounts, even the open sourced code was complete garbage, and the documentation was little better than toilet paper. Then take the fact that this was apparently Ted Nelson’s pet project and fuck everyone who wanted to do things differently or more efficiently, you can see why it is DOA for decades.
We do know some things. The original push was more towards document publishing and copyright management – an interactive multimedia webpage is not something that’s really handled well under Xanadu. If you’re old enough to remember the early web, before search engines, it’s more about forward and back links, where you’d daisy chain links until you got to where you wanted or used some sort of link aggregator. It had no provision for things like modern search indexing or embedded images/video. [Transclusion](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transclusion) was also a major point (which foresaw the rise of microtransactions and paywalls), although that has since appeared to have been partially adopted by the modern web at some point.
So say you wanted to quote something from a book. You’d include a link to that book, and in turn that book would also contain a link back to you. You could see how this could be a problem, since if you had a link to, say, the Bible, literally *everyone* who linked to a passage would be listed, making it useless. Then throw in Xanadu’s payment requirements for referenced material, you’d get spammed with a billion requests to pay for something. It’s simply unfeasible.
Very esoteric is correct (also from what I’ve read).
How’s this for an explanation of why the WWW took off, and Xanadu didn’t: Xanadu is an example of what happens when people over-think an idea, and then want everyone to deeply understand every aspect of the technology in order to use it. Instead of showing off a simple use case and how an ordinary person can participate (what the WWW did), they wanted everyone to first invest a lot of time learning the system in order to use it for the first time.
One big difference technical is that in Project Xanadu the links are from paragraphs to remote paragraphs of content, allowing both the page you’re on and the page being linked to change over time, and yet you would still have valid links.
Keeping links working is important for big companies with hundreds of thousands of documents, many of them out of date but where some of them are still critical. Keeping track of digital documents is surprisingly difficult.
there are good links at [archive.org](https://web.archive.org/web/20110718125208/http://xanadu.com/tech/)
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