http://tomorrowelephant.net/2005/07/31/the-curse-of-xanadu/ a million elephants typing Wed, 13 Jul 2011 19:24:02 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.4 hourly 1 http://tomorrowelephant.net/2005/07/31/the-curse-of-xanadu/comment-page-1/#comment-98160 Jakob Sun, 14 Mar 2010 18:52:06 +0000 http://tomorrowelephant.net/index.php/2005/07/31/the-curse-of-xanadu/#comment-98160 <p>His book "literary machines" has been reprinted and should be availble at more libraries. It is definitely worth a look because Nelson describes Xanadu in more detail. You should read about the history of xanadu (chapter 2) - his vision was beyond technical possibilities until the 80s and then it got all overshaded by the WWW which does not even cover basic aspects like bidirectional links, versioning and transclusion of parts of other documents. The whole story is very tragic and once you realize the vision of Xanadu it is very frustrating to see how poorly computer systems still support reading, publishing, annotating, linking and modifying documents if they could do so much better.</p> His book “literary machines” has been reprinted and should be availble at more libraries. It is definitely worth a look because Nelson describes Xanadu in more detail. You should read about the history of xanadu (chapter 2) - his vision was beyond technical possibilities until the 80s and then it got all overshaded by the WWW which does not even cover basic aspects like bidirectional links, versioning and transclusion of parts of other documents. The whole story is very tragic and once you realize the vision of Xanadu it is very frustrating to see how poorly computer systems still support reading, publishing, annotating, linking and modifying documents if they could do so much better.

]]>