[ih] Internet analyses (Was Re: IPv8...)

[Brian E Carpenter]

> the difficulty of implementing "2-way
> links" seemed to play no part in Xanadu's failure.  Presumably, someone
> could build them as an extension to WWW if the world really valued them.

Hyper-G tried that and went nowhere.

Regards/Ngā mihi
    Brian

On 20-May-26 07:50, John Gilmore via Internet-history wrote:
> John Levine via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
>> Ted Nelson had been faffing about trying to implement his Xanadu
>> hypertext idea for decades, but never got very far because it was much
>> too ambitious. Tim built what's pretty much the implementable subset
>> (i.e., one-way rather than two-way links) and that's the Web. Unlike
>> its predecessors it worked, he had users that liked it, and here we
>> are.
> 
> Contrasting points about Xanadu and WWW:
> 
> Xanadu was proprietary and thus discouraged people from working on it.
> Its high level structure was documented (in 2 books), but none of the
> implementation details.  WWW was well documented in specifications,
> explanations, and in free/libre software.
> 
> Technically Xanadu was not federated -- it was designed to be centrally
> run.  The plan was to have locally run "franchises" in towns, where you
> could go to access it.  In theory people could run their own servers,
> but every server, every user, and every document had to have a centrally
> assigned and validated identity, and a financial account tied to that.
> This was much more complicated both organizationally and technically.
> WWW was federated by using the DNS to find each resource, and no central
> coordination was required beyond the centrally managed DNS system.
> 
> Xanadu had an economic model that charged readers and funded publishers
> and authors.  But that was never implemented.  WWW had no economic
> model, was free to access and free to publish (plus the costs of
> installing and learning software, and running servers).  I believe this
> was WWW's biggest failing, since it led to the free-TV
> advertising-funded business model.  This was rapidly followed by
> centralized search engines that were paid by third party advertisers,
> technical and social tricks for deep surveillance on readers, and
> technical and social tricks for coerced attention extraction.  Xanadu
> would probably have had attention coercion too, since publishers were
> planned to be paid based on how much reading users did.
> 
> WWW was competently implemented many times.  Xanadu was incompletely
> implemented several times, but the small team kept throwing away the
> early implementations (rather than releasing them to gain experience and
> a community) and rewriting it from scratch in niche languages like
> Smalltalk.  Ultimately it failed because it never shipped a working
> version -- nor any version at all.  By 1992 it had burned out its only
> serious financial backer, and most of its volunteers, and it never
> recovered thereafter.
> 
> By 1999, a dedicated volunteer (Roger Gregory) resurrected the last two
> dead Xanadu code bases and gathered the permission to release them as
> MIT-licensed software.  See:
> 
>    http://udanax.xanadu.com/
> 
> By then, nobody cared; WWW had grown exponentially and couldn't be
> caught by competitors.  And the latest half-done code (Udanax Gold)
> had bit-rotted due to its arcane implementation language, so it's quite
> hard to even extract, let alone run or modify.  The earlier
> implementation (Udanax Green) is probably buildable and runnable, but
> does not implement most of the design (such as the economic model).  The
> last updates I found were from 2015:
> 
>    https://xanadu.com.au/mail/xanadu/msg00485.html
> 
> An interesting bit for me is that the difficulty of implementing "2-way
> links" seemed to play no part in Xanadu's failure.  Presumably, someone
> could build them as an extension to WWW if the world really valued them.
> The world of 2026 has much better tools for widely distributed
> replicated databases: not just commercially rentable server farms and
> Terabit Ethernets, but distributed hash tables, blockchains, BitTorrent,
> and conventional transactional databases that can work at scale.  When
> Xanadu was being implemented, there were no scalable networked
> databases, because there were only a few thousand machines on real
> networks in the whole world.  Airplane reservations, for example,
> were still handled on a single mainframe running very custom software.
> 
> 	John
> 	
> 
> 
>