gnu@sun.uucp (John Gilmore) (12/25/84)
> Mark Biggar: ...I like followups that > reply to a massage in a point by point manner, alternating old text with the > new. Clearly we need to interface netnews to Xanadu Hypertext. (I believe they have it running on a single machine -- I don't know if they'd be happy with uucp as a distribution medium though!) Unfortunately Ted Nelson and friends (who are my friends too) are holding tightly to the secrets of Xanadu rather than releasing it to the public domain. They claim this is partly a fanatic dedication to seeing it done right (rather than having somebody like TRW pick it up and use it for Oppression?). Personally I think that running netnews as a gigantic hypertext publishing system (maybe with a free-part and a costs-money-to-read-part) would be a gigantic feather in their caps, producing a large body of hypertext plus a large collection of fanatical readers in a short period of time.