Ted Nelson demonstrates Xanadu Space

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Strong rec Keyframe · 2016-10 · on “Ask HN: What's your favorite tech talk?”

Too many great talks to mention, but if I had to pick one it would be Ted Nelson's few minutes of demonstration of Xanadu. Demonstration is lacking, but what he said about the concept/idea is what stuck with me. Deep and referential(?) content. [this video]

Recommends sp332 · 2011-04 · on “Pictures of the first GUIs from Xerox”

And if you're into watching long videos of what the digital future was supposed to look like, Douglas Adams and Tom Baker made a documentary called Hyperland , and you can watch all 50 minutes of it here: [LINK] or if you want a shorter video, here's Ted Nelson with a short demo of Xanadu as it existed in 2008: [this video]

Recommends michaelbuddy · 2013-02 · on “Content Management by Redefining the Document”

this is a great supplement for this: [this video] a close up demo. His product Xanadu space, I hope it comes to light but the websites aren't looking too hot.

Recommends gum_ina_package · 2014-01 · on “Ted Nelson: It All Went Wrong at Xerox PARC”

This video of his seems to give more of a demonstration of his alternative paradigm: [this video] It's really interesting to see, but in order for any of his idea to actually work you need to rethink the entire operating system it seems - not just the UI. He wants all content to have history, which would fundamentally break copy and paste (one of his points actually). The problem I see with that is you'd still have individual files (actual bits) on the hard drive, just they'd all have some meta content that describes it's origin. Or you'd need some sort of database file system (WinFS). I'd like to see technology trending more this guy's way, but the reality is that the technological challenges se

Recommends alexashka · 2018-04 · on “Gradual Programming”

Everything you've mentioned completely misses the point - it is not just performance that stinks, it is not just javascript as a language that stinks - all these tools are incremental improvements that completely lack imagination. It is the platform itself - meant to display static text content, being coerced into some frankenstein that requires never-ending libraries and tooling to do what desktop apps did 20 years ago. It is hard to see any other world, so let me link you to a guy to whom it was obvious the web browsers stink decades ago. [this video] [LINK]

Cites 6d0debc071 · 2013-08 · on “Show HN: Gingko, a tree-document editor”

Zig Zag was meant to represent a very general set of data structures, if you're interested in documents then you, probably, would have a more specific interest in his (very long running) Xanadu project - [LINK] - which in some ways is very similar to OP's stuff - [this video]

Cites nudpiedo · 2022-07 · on “OpenXanadu”

I hope to see xanadu succeed, even if it is only on some specialized niches. By seeing value on those niches more and more projects and people would understand the benefits of such system and would like to implement it. But I also believe there will be always a space for current webapps, treating links as RPCs against external systems. EDIT: For anyone interested here is Ted Nelson explaining the system in 2008 on an example system implementation of his original idea: [this video]

Cites jazzyjackson · 2022-11 · on “Show HN: Structpad: notepad-database hybrid that helps you use abstract thinking”

For your perusal, here's a video of Ted demonstrating Xanadu: [0] (3min18sec to jump right to the demo) You can also browse the book he published describing the system, Literary Machines (1981) [1] -- it's a sprawling vision but I think where the parent sees overlap is in storing each text fragment as a singular entity and visualizing the links between two fragments. > A user may also make side-by-side connections of other types. On contemplating any two pieces of text, he may make a link between them. Thereafter, when he displays either piece of text, and asks to see the links, a link-symbol is displayed, and the other attached text — if he wishes to see it. > Naturally, making a marginal n