Xanadu

  When I published Computer Lib in 1974, computers were big oppressive systems off in air-conditioned rooms. In the 1987 edition of Computer Lib-the Microsoft edition!-I wrote, "Now you can be oppressed in your own living room!" It has gotten far worse. (Nelson, "Today's Horrible Computer World")  
In 1965 Ted Nelson coined the terms "hypertext" and "hypermedia" in a paper to the Association of Computing Machinery's (ACM) twentieth national conference, referring to non-sequential writings and branching presentations of all types (Nelson, "The Hypertext,"). Five years earlier, he designed two screen windows connected by visible lines that pointed from parts of an object in one window to corresponding parts of an object in another window. He called for the transformation of computers into "literary machines" which would link together all human writing, and he saw this associational organisation of computers as a model of his own creative and distractible consciousness, which he described as a "hummingbird mind" (Nelson, "A File Structure,"). Nelson defined hypermedia as:
  …branching or performing presentations which respond to user actions, systems of prearranged words and pictures (for example) that may be explored freely and queried in stylized ways. They will not be "programmed" but rather designed, written and drawn and edited by authors, artists, designers and editors. Like ordinary prose and pictures, they will be media and because they are in some sense "multi-dimensional," we may call them hypermedia, following the mathematical use of the term "hyper." (Nelson, Computer Lib, 133)  
Nelson's vision of how information may be accessed associatively using a computerized system is what completed the pieces of the puzzle that finally resulted in what we now know as the World Wide Web. This was Nelson's Xanadu, a next generation vision of Well's World Brain. To this day, Nelson continues to work on his Xanadu project, proposing alternatives to the monolithic system being built by corporations such as Microsoft. He maintains that the Xanadu system is extremely different from that of HTML or any other popular system. The Xanadu connective structure consists of both links and transclusions, in which a link is a connection between things that are different and a transclusion is a connection between things that are the same. But, while it was still in development, Tim Berners-Lee came up with what we know today as the World Wide Web, which completely overshadowed Xanadu.

According to Nelson, "Project Xanadu was the explicit inspiration for the World Wide Web (see Tim Berners-Lee's original proposal for the World Wide Web), for Lotus Notes (as freely acknowledged by its creator, Ray Ozzie) and for HyperCard (acknowledged by its developer, Bill Atkinson); as well as less-well-known systems, including Microcosm and Hyperwave" (Nelson, "Xanalogical Media").

With the introduction of a GUI (graphic user interface) to the vast repository of information on the Internet, Fuller's Geoscope, Bush's Memex, Wells's World Brain, and Nelson's Xanadu were suddenly collapsed into one huge infrastructure driven by the combined interests of corporations and academia. Because of the seemingly impossible task of organising the existing Internet into a cohesive and controllable communication network, the joint efforts of industry and academia have put plans in place for Internet 2, which, unlike the original Internet, is very much a planned enterprise.