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

[John R. Levine]

> 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. ...

Yes, this all agrees with my recollections.

> 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. ...

Ted is a great visionary and a terrible manager.  It is obvious to us now 
and was fairly obvious in the day that the only way to get Xanadu to 
happen was to do it incrementally, but Ted wanted it all, so he got 
nothing.

R's,
John

PS:

> networks in the whole world.  Airplane reservations, for example,
> were still handled on a single mainframe running very custom software.

Airline reservations still are handled on single mainframes running TPF 
which is a distant descendant of the original SABRE which was modelled 
after real-time model of the 1950s SAGE system.  It's easy to do the 
searches and front end stuff on distributed racks of small machines, but 
for the databases where you have to sell each seat exactly once and bill 
for it exactly once, there's no subtitute for a large centralized system.