phr (07/22/82)
Several people have asked in recent times what's happened to Ted Nelson and the Xanadu (tm) Hypertext system. Well, Hypercon, the 8th annual Xanadu convention, will be held all day July 31 (the Saturday after the SIGGRAPH conference), on the 8th floor at the MIT AI lab in Cambridge, MA. The Xanadu system will be shown running (slowly) on an Onyx; it's all written in C, and fast VAX and 68000 implementations are expected in the future. Ted will be present with various other Xanadu personages (Roger Gregory, Mark Miller, Eric Drexler, and the usual cast of dozens). Tentative program includes a 2-hour talk by Ted Nelson, and various technical discussions with the rest of the group. These include a seminar on front-end design, a separate long session on the details of how to build a front end (including a walkthrough of an existing one), a talk on document formats and standards, and a session on Xanadu licensing and services. For those of you wondering what this means, hypertext is the non-sequential writing described in Ted's classic Computer Lib/Dream Machines, and what will be shown is an implementation of one particular hypertext system discussed in more detail in Ted's more recent (but harder to find) book Literary Machines. Any brief description I could give here like "Xanadu allows you to create arbitrary links between documents, maintain separate and parallel versions of documents without storing anything twice, and instantly jump to documents cited or quoted in whatever you're reading" would just make it sound like a glorified XINFO (or, gasp, SCCS). But it's much more than this; the vision encompasses electronic publishing and doing away with the distribution of books and journals on dried tree pulp. You should all read CL/DM if you're interested in this sort of thing. Plug dept: CL/DM is also a wonderful if slightly dated introduction to computerdom and the world of graphics, both for beginners and old hackers. Hypercon's site will only have room for around 100, so please send me mail if you plan to attend. I'm planning to drive up from Murray Hill, NJ late Friday or early Saturday. Anyone interested in ride sharing (your car or mine)? --Paul Rubin 201-582-2498