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During his first year as a graduate student at Harvard, Nelson began implementing the system which contained the basic outline of what would become Project Xanadu: a word processor capable of storing multiple versions, and displaying the differences between these versions. Though he did not complete this implementation, a mock up of the system proved sufficient to inspire interest in others.
On top of this basic idea, Nelson wished to facilitate "nonsequential writing", where the user could choose their own path through an electronic document. He built upon this idea in a paper to the ACM in 1965, calling the new idea "zippered lists". These zippered lists would allow compound documents to be formed from pieces of other documents, an idea he would later refer to as transclusion. In 1967, while working for Harcourt, Brace he named his idea Xanadu, in honour of the poem Kubla Khan by Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
Ted Nelson published his visionary ideas in his 1974 book Computer Lib/Dream Machines and the 1981 Literary Machines. Computer Lib/Dream Machines is written in a non-sequential fashion: it is a compilation of Nelson's random thoughts about computing, among other topics. The books are printed back to back, to be flipped between. Computer Lib contains Nelson's thoughts on topics which angered him, Dream Machines discusses his hopes for the potential of computers to assist the arts.
In 1972, Cal Daniels completed the first demo version of the Xanadu software on a computer Nelson had rented for the purpose, though Nelson soon ran out of money. In 1974, with the advent of computer networking, Nelson revised his thoughts about Xanadu into a centralised source of information which he dubbed a "docuverse".
In the summer of 1979, Nelson led the latest group of his followers, Roger Gregory, Mark Miller and Stuart Greene, to Swarthmore. In a house rented by Gregory, they hashed out their ideas for Xanadu; but at the end of the summer the group went their separate ways. Miller and Gregory created an addressing system based on transfinite numbers which they called tumblers, which allowed any part of a file to be referenced.
The group continued their work, almost to the point of bankruptcy. In 1983, however, Nelson met John Walker, founder of AutodeskAutodesk is a company founded in 1982 specializing in design software and services. Its flagship products are AutoCAD and 3D Studio MAX. It is headquartered in San Rafael, California in Marin County. Autodesk is publicly traded on Nasdaq (ADSK). History A, at a conference for the people mentioned in Steven LevySteven Levy is an American journalist who has written several books on computers, technology, cryptography, the Internet, cyber security and privacy. Levy is a senior editor and chief technology writer for Newsweek writing mainly on the "Science & Technol's HackersHackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution (BooksEnthsiast.com) is a book by Steven Levy about the hacker culture. It was published in 1984 in Garden City, New York by Anchor Press/ Doubleday. Levy describes the people, the machines, and the events that defi, and the group started working on Xanadu with Autodesk's financial backing.
While at Autodesk, the group, lead by Gregory, completed a version of the software, written in the C programming languageThe C Programming Language Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie, the original edition that served for many years as an informal specification of the language The C programming language is a low-level standardized programming language developed in the early, though the software didn't work as well as they wanted. A newer group of programmers, hired from Xerox PARCXerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) was a flagship research division of the Xerox Corporation, based in Palo Alto, California, USA. It was founded in 1970 and spun out as a separate company in 2002. PARC's founding director, George Pake, was an outstan, used this as justification to rewrite the software in SmalltalkSmalltalk is a dynamically typed object oriented programming language designed at Xerox PARC by Alan Kay, Dan Ingalls, Ted Kaehler, Adele Goldberg, and others during the 1970s. The language was generally released as Smalltalk-80 and has been widely used s. This effectively split the group into two factions, and the decision to rewrite put a deadline imposed by Autodesk out of the team's reach. In August 1992, Autodesk divested the Xanadu group, which became the Xanadu Operating Company, which struggled due to internal struggles and lack of investment.
Charlie Smith, the founder of a company called MemexThe memex was a theoretical analog computer described by the scientist and engineer Vannevar Bush in the 1945 The Atlantic Monthly article " As We May Think. The word was a contraction of "memory extender". Bush described the device as electronically link (the name of the hypertext system designed by Vannevar BushVannevar Bush ( March 11, 1890 June 30, 1974) was an American scientist. Born in Chelsea, Massachusetts, Bush was educated at Tufts College, graduating in 1913. He joined the Department of Electrical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technolog), hired many of the Xanadu programmers and licensed the Xanadu technology, though Memex soon faced financial difficulties, and the unpaid programmers left, taking the computers with them. At around this time, Tim Berners-Lee was developing the World Wide Web.
In 1998, Nelson released the source code to Xanadu as Project Udanax, in the hope that the techniques and algorithms used could help to overturn some software patents.