Ian & Stuart's Australian Mac: Not for Sale/Another.not.for.sale (Australia).iso/hold me in your arms/Michael Ney's Cyberculture/Cyberculture/Nelson's Xanadu Light

Text File | 1994-09-02 | 13KB | 255 lines

Topic 262       Nelson's Xanadu Light   1 response
peg:visionary   cyberculture zone        9:00 PM  Dec  5, 1993

From Tidbits - Dec 4, 1993

Xanadu Light

The high point of Hypertext '93 was of course the talk given by
Ted Nelson after the reception in his honor. Nelson is a
thoroughly engaging speaker, and he devoted much of the first half
of his talk to providing the audience an overview of the 32-year
history of Xanadu, Nelson's electronic publishing world view.
Nelson's books, including Computer Lib/Dream Machines (one book)
and Literary Machines, are required reading for anyone in the field.

What interested me was the reaction Nelson received in the crowd.
I don't mean the public questions and comments, but the asides and
looks various members of the audience traded during the talk.
Members of the hypertext community seem to view Nelson with a
complicated mix of awe and devotion (after all, he is the father
of hypertext) combined with an almost cruel pity and ridicule.
I suspect this mockery, which was seldom voiced loudly, but was
evidenced in eye-rolling and smirks, stems from the fact that
despite his long involvement with hypertext, Nelson has never
shipped a product. Xanadu has been vaporware longer than many of
us have been alive. The reaction concerned me, because even though
Xanadu has yet to appear, that fact is independent of Nelson's
ideas, just as much theoretical physics is more or less
independent of practical application at the moment. It may mean
that he's a theoretical hypertext scientist, but there's no shame
in that. I sensed a vague paranoia in Nelson, but one that is
probably justifiable if his ideas have received similar reactions
(and most likely, even worse ones) in the past. It's a shame, and
let me attempt to convey his concepts in relation to the new
Xanadu, now called Xanadu Light. Much of this information comes
from the handouts Nelson provided with his talk.

To bring you up to date quickly, it seemed as though the hope for
Xanadu lay with Autodesk, the CAD giant that purchased it back in
1988. Unfortunately, after investing five years and five million
dollars, Autodesk dropped the project in 1993. Nelson didn't say
specifically, but I have the impression that all that development
effort remained at Autodesk; all he managed to get back was the
trademarked name. In large part because of that, I suspect, Xanadu
Light is now based on garden-variety database programs and using
the Internet for worldwide access. Nelson mentioned something
about searching for stuff via Gopher and then telnetting in or
using a dialup BBS to actually retrieve the information - I'm sure
a custom front end would appear quickly.

Within Xanadu, people can have three roles - readers, publishers,
and suppliers. As a reader, you connect to the entire Xanadu
universe by connecting to one Xanadu supplier. You can browse
hypertext links indefinitely from document to document. No records
are kept of your hypertext trail or of the items you send for, and
you can keep what you receive (a receipt token helps you file it
for future reference).

As a publisher, you may link to, comment on, or append information
to any published document. Quoting documents by what Nelson calls
a "transclusion pointer" automatically links your document to the
original and pays the original publisher for the data, and
although you have no control over who links to your documents, the
documents themselves are kept inviolate. Everything is handled by
links. You may publish anything within the law (which Nelson notes
is going to be a big issue in the future), and you take
responsibility for the contents of anything you publish, just as
in traditional paper publishing.

As a supplier, you can locate your business anywhere and allow
your customers to connect to you in any way. You can charge what
you like for storage of published documents and for connection
time, and you have complete control over credits and payments. In
an attempt to avoid the mega-companies that currently dominate
publishing (apparently there are about 40 "important" publishing
companies out of a set of some 70,000), Nelson specifically
designed Xanadu on a franchise system. Anyone can set up as a
supplier with some hardware and a connection, and anyone can set
up as a publisher

In brief then:

* The publisher pays for storage, the reader pays for delivery,
  along with a small per-byte royalty. Nelson recommends rates in
  the range of 1/10,000 of a cent per byte for text, perhaps one
  cent per minute of video.

* The reader may send for any portion of any document and pays for
  just that portion, not the entire document. However, since the
  rates are so low, there's no concept of browsing and then choosing
  what you want to buy. You pay for everything you see.

* Anyone may quote anything in the Xanadu network by transclusion
  (virtual inclusion - it's a hard concept to convey without an
  illustration, perhaps think of it as a publish & subscribe type
  link) from another publisher's document. Royalties continue to
  flow automatically to the original publisher of information.

* Anyone may publish links to anything in the Xanadu network (but
  remember, original documents remain inviolate, so you don't have
  to worry about your data being corrupted by virtual graffiti).

* Every document has an owner, the publisher, and that person pays
  for its storage on a Xanadu host machine.

* Every link is also owned as a part of some document.

* Connecting to one Xanadu node connects you to all nodes, and
  thus all documents and data objects. This inherently implies some
  sort of global name space for objects, I would assume.

* All data structures are welcome and connectable; there are no
  closed objects. This will prevent what Nelson calls the
  "Balkanization" of electronic media, where the data objects are
  inherently proprietary and isolated.

Copyright always comes up in these sort of discussions about Xanadu,
but the system handles copyright and royalties automatically and
unobtrusively. Since every document has a known owner, and since there's
no reason why you wouldn't quote something as opposed to retyping it
(it's thinkable, but I imagine it would become culturally taboo to do
so), any owned data will always remain owned. Royalties (set by the
publisher) flow automatically from the reader to the publisher on a
per-byte basis, and give the reader the right to backup and one printout
as well, altho there's no reason alternative arrangements couldn't be made.

Xanadu Light, then, is essentially four public database tables,
plus content bytes stored in standard and nonstandard files. Each
document lists its contents in a public table, and users may query
the database using standard queries or SQL queries for more
complex searches. As I understand it, some sort of client software
would be responsible for presenting this information and allowing
you to browse and search among it.

From Nelson's handouts, then, here are the four database tables.


Grand directory of all documents (public table)
 ---------------------------------------------------------------
 Author | Title | Document | Date of     | Owner | Size (may
        |       | type     | publication |       | be misleading
        |       |          |             |       | in hypermedia)
 ---------------------------------------------------------------


Sequential pieces of a document (royalty bytes)

   Note that a document may include part of any other document,
   simply by including that part in this table. Permission to
   do so is assured by our publishing contract.

 -------------------------------------------------------------
 Type  | Owner | Author | Publisher | Where  | Size | Royalty
 of    |       |        |           | stored |      | per byte
 piece |       |        |           |        |      |
 -------------------------------------------------------------

Document's outbound links

   A document may contain any number of links of any number of
   types. Each link connects to particular sets of bytes in
   this or other documents. Note that link contained in one
   document may connect material between two others.

 ---------------------------------------------------------
 Type of link | left endset (bytes, | right endset (bytes,
              |  node, document)    | node, document)
 ---------------------------------------------------------

Document's inbound connections (harpoons)

   This table records all the links and transclusions citing
   this document from elsewhere. Since these connections are
   made by the choice of others, the others pay for their
   presence in this table.

 -----------------------------------------------------------
 Type of connection | left endset (bytes, | right endset
 (transclusion, or  |  node, document)    | (bytes, node,
   link of whatever |                     |  document)
   type)            |                     |
 -----------------------------------------------------------

I realize that's not a totally satisfactory explanation of it all,
and Nelson didn't intend it to be. However, I would like to say
that this article is a perfect example of what Xanadu would be
good for. Rather than try to recreate ASCII tables, I could merely
have quoted them so that you all saw the originals, and so that
the royalties could go directly to Ted Nelson. As it stands, I'm
going to have to hope that this article stirs enough interest
among folks who are in a position to help out with Xanadu. For
more information and contracts, send a self-addressed, stamped,
envelope to:

    Xanadu On-Line Publishing
    3020 Bridgeway #295
    Sausalito, CA  94965  USA

Nelson said he had to give up on email when he found himself with $$



Project Xanadu (Australia)
P.O. Box 409 Canterbury VIC 3126
[phone]
CONTACT: Andrew Pam or Katherine Phelps

                          Ted Nelson: Hyperman

Ted Nelson, leading computing luminary and visionary, is visiting
Australia as part of a plan to set up the world's first Xanadu system.
Ted Nelson conceived of Xanadu in 1960 when, inspired by a computer
course, he envisioned an electronic world publishing repository of
interactive, multimedia hypertext (a term which he coined along with
hypermedia) which would form a vast interconnected literature.  His
books ~Computer Lib/Dream Machines~ (1974) (reputed to be the world's
most stolen work, and still in print through Microsoft Press as Bill
Gates sees it as a significant influence on his own career), ~The Home
Computer Revolution~ (1977) and ~Literary Machines~ (1981) have greatly
influenced the present state of computer communications.  Some of the
ideas Ted had over thirty years ago are only now being implemented in
modern computer network systems.  World Wide Web, an international
network with over a thousand servers and a 3000% (three thousand
percent) per annum growth rate, credits Ted Nelson's work as the basis
for its formation.

Ted Nelson was prominently featured on the BBC-TV documentary
~Hyperland~ by Douglas Adams, and on PBS-TV series ~The Machine that
Changed the World.~  It has been said of him: "Nelson's books ...
ventured dozens of predictions about the future of personal computers,
many of which turned out to be strikingly accurate ... As a forecaster
in a notoriously un predictable field, Ted Nelson has done better than
most..."  Howard Rheingold, ~Tools for Thought.~  "[Buckminster]
Fuller's successor."  ~The New Republic,~ 1988.  "Madman extraordinaire
and one of the most brilliant minds of our time."  Michael Fraase in
~Macintosh Hypermedia vol. I.~

Ted Nelson has been the dolphin photographer and movie maker for John
Lilly.  Timothy Leary is a long time friend and producer of Ted Nelson's
film, ~Silicon Valley Story.~  Ted Nelson has also been in close working
association with Douglas Englebart (inventor of word processing and the
mouse), Nicholas Negroponte (Director of the MIT Media Lab) and K. Eric
Drexler (founder of nanotechnology and author of ~Engines of Creation~).
In 1983 Ted Nelson was selected by the editors of ~Playgirl~ for the
"American Bachelors Register."

Ted Nelson will be giving a talk about the concepts behind Xanadu at the
Victorian State Film Centre Tuesday April 12, 3pm and will be available
for interviews Monday April 11 (other times negotiable).

Andrew Pam                                      [e-mail]
Manager, Serious Cybernetics                    [e-mail]
& Project Xanadu (Australia)                    [e-mail]
P.O. Box 409, Canterbury VIC 3126 Australia     [e-mail]