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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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Keeping links working is important for big companies with hundreds of thousands of documents, many of them out of date but where some of them are still critical.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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