doug@eris (Doug Merritt) (04/10/88)
In article <908@nuchat.UUCP> peter@nuchat.UUCP (Peter da Silva) writes: > >Hey! What happened to Amiga Xanadu? Anything new on that front lately? For one thing, don't hold your breath for anything out of the Xanadu project...they are chronically understaffed and underfunded. I have the impression that they're in an infinite design loop, too, since it's been several years now that they've had alpha stuff running on a Sun, but it never gets released. One further gets the impression that they are so visionary that they will have troubles with real world marketing, despite their "Speaker-to-Bankers" associate (my all-time favorite business card job title, btw). Roger Gregory was their only "full-time" person for a long time; I don't know about right this instant. For another thing, last time I checked they were not especially hot on the Amiga...they had one lying around that someone would periodically do a little Xanadu front end work for, while it gathered dust the rest of the time. Their interest is in the Sun as a back end server, and primarily on the Mac and Atari ST as front ends. (BTW they're in Palo Alto, California, and interested parties should see the (latest) edition of "Literary Machines" for definition of data structures and overall design. Also note that "Computer Lib" has a new edition out with a great many updates.) This might have changed recently if some Amiga hacker has gotten more free time to work on it, but see paragraph 1 above. Ted Nelson *has* seen the NewTek demo on their in-house Amiga and apparently was impressed. Furthermore Nelson has recently moved from Texas to Palo Alto, apparently to support the efforts more directly. (I don't know if this is good or bad; we'll see.) Anyone in the Palo Alto area with some serious interest & free time should contact them; they'd probably welcome some help. One more thing...they have been distributing their documentation via Owl's "Guide" hypertext program for the Mac, which they apparently approve of. I don't know what they think about Hypercard. They appear to be one of the only groups working on a sort of universal global hypertext data base, in a visionary futuristic sense; most of the other folks in the world are doing localized hypertext data bases (stuff stored just on your local machine or distributed across a LAN, as opposed to "having the world's knowledge at your fingertips"). Doug Merritt doug@mica.berkeley.edu (ucbvax!mica!doug) or ucbvax!unisoft!certes!doug
doug@eris (Doug Merritt) (04/11/88)
In article <8531@agate.BERKELEY.EDU> doug@eris.UUCP (Doug Merritt) writes: >In article <908@nuchat.UUCP> peter@nuchat.UUCP (Peter da Silva) writes: >> >>Hey! What happened to Amiga Xanadu? Anything new on that front lately? > >For one thing, don't hold your breath for anything out of the Xanadu >project...they are chronically understaffed and underfunded. I My news on the subject was old, so I did some more checking last night and discovered some inaccuracies in my posting. There are some changes happening with Xanadu that might result in something concrete, but it's not-to-be-discussed at the moment. It may be some months before they're ready to allow any public statements about what, if anything, happened or will happen. Yes, they do have a working Amiga front end, a simple character-oriented port from an IBM PC. And the backend on the Sun sounds like it's in at least moderately good shape after all. And it's not Xanadu documentation that's distributed via Owl's Guide hypertext program...what happened is that the author of Guide, Alan Boyd, got the rights to Literary Machines for distribution in Guide form. As to the Xanadu attitude towards both Guide and Hypertext, it's that both are helping increase awareness of hypertext, and as such are Good Things, but that they are significantly different than what Xanadu is doing and hence are not any kind of competition. I guess that's obvious, anyway. Doug Merritt doug@mica.berkeley.edu (ucbvax!mica!doug) or ucbvax!unisoft!certes!doug
UH2@PSUVM.BITNET (Lee Sailer) (04/12/88)
In alt.hypertext there is an announcement that 80% of the Xanadu(tm) project has been acquired by the software company that makes AutoCADD.
ewhac@well.UUCP (Leo 'Bols Ewhac' Schwab) (04/12/88)
In article <8531@agate.BERKELEY.EDU> doug@eris.UUCP (Doug Merritt) writes: >In article <908@nuchat.UUCP> peter@nuchat.UUCP (Peter da Silva) writes: >> >>Hey! What happened to Amiga Xanadu? Anything new on that front lately? > >For one thing, don't hold your breath for anything out of the Xanadu >project...they are chronically understaffed and underfunded. [ ... ] This is no longer the case. Ten Nelson held a press conference at the 13th annual West Coast Computer Faire: 80% of Xanadu Operating Company has been picked up by AutoDesk, makers of AutoCAD. They're going to hire seven new programmers, and start serious work on the Xanadu back-end. From my perspective, this works great, since Ten Nelson has moved into a houseboat in Sausalito, which is a 45 minute bike ride away from me. _-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_ Leo L. Schwab -- The Guy in The Cape ihnp4!pacbell -\ \_ -_ Recumbent Bikes: dual ---> !{well,unicom}!ewhac O----^o The Only Way To Fly. hplabs / (pronounced "AE-wack") "Work FOR? I don't work FOR anybody! I'm just having fun." -- The Doctor