The mention of Ted Nelson in the Kevin Kelly Wired article I blogged about previously intrigued me sufficiently to find out more about this lauded father of hypertext I’d never heard of before. What I discovered was something of a cautionary tale for me: those who know me know that I’m not too good at finishing things, and that’s what Nelson is all about.
The Wikipedia article pointed me to an another Wired piece by Gary Wolf that tells Nelson’s fascinating story in considerable detail. There’s no denying that the man is an incredible visionary, but a lot of his tale is just plain weird. For example, what got him started on his idea of a global database Xanadu — where everything could be linked to everything else, versioned, referenced and footnoted effortlessly — was the fact that he has ADHD. Now that’s hubris — set out to bring about the greatest revolution in the history of media technology to help you concentrate!
In hindsight, Nelson more or less pulled it off as well, in spite of Xanadu ending up floating in vaporware limbo forever. Nelson regards Tim Berners-Lee as an arrogant pup who basically came up with an inferior cartoon copy of Xanadu, but his influence on what one could call the Hackers’ Greatest Generation is undeniable. His sprawling 1200-page magnum opus, Computer Lib, sounds like something I’d like to have a look at — just to get a sense of the mind that produced this bizarre artifact, memorized verbatim by many fanatical hackers. Edinburgh University Library does appear to have a copy…
Nelson’s vision of Xanadu was not in line with what we now think of as the Internet either. His 70s pitch was more the McDonalds of information, complete with an advertising jingle!
The greatest things you’ve ever seen
Dance your wishes on the screen
All the things that man has known
Comin’ on the telephone -
Poems, books and pictures too
Comin’ on the Xanadu.
Nelson is still alive and active, working as a philosopher in Oxford. One of his current projects is something called ZigZag that claims to be a new kind of data structure to replace the traditional file hierarchy. Curiously, even though I was unaware of Nelson’s work, I’d heard of ZigZag before: one of the leaders of a SourceForge project trying to produce a Java-based implementation of ZigZag was Tuomas Lukka, a Finnish prodigy who obtained his PhD in chemistry at the age of 19 and has since been teaching at the University of Jyväskylä. Apparently he’s now left the project for personal reasons — and also appears to have vanished completely from the Internet. I wonder if he’s also become a victim of the curse of Xanadu?
There’s a lot of poetic irony in Nelson’s choice of name. Xanadu was where Kubla Khan built his stately pleasure-dome in Coleridge’s poem. Coleridge scribbled down the first lines in a fit of opiatic creative fervor and was never able to continue the poem again…