Monday, March 25, 2019
“Woe unto all who reveal the Secrets contained herein for they shall be Hunted unto the Ends of the Universe”
This is a document I wrote in early 1984 at the behest of the System Development Foundation as part of Xanadu’s quest for funding. It is a detailed explanation of the Xanadu architecture, its core data structures, and the theory that underlies those data structures, along with a (really quite laughable) project plan for completing the system.
At the time, we regarded all the internal details of how Xanadu worked as deep and dark trade secrets, mostly because in that pre- open source era we were stupid about intellectual property. As a consequence of this foolish secretive stance, it was never widely circulated and subsequently disappeared into the archives, apparently lost for all time. Until today!
Via Lobsters, Habitat Chronicles: A Lost Treasure of Xanadu
It is the Xanadu concept
of tumblers that is core to how
mod_blog works, although
more in idea than in actual implementation detail. And the web in general has
a limited form of transclusion which
is pretty much just images (still and moving) and sound. A general version of transclusion would probably be
very difficult (if not outright impossible) to implement. But there are still
concepts that Xanadu has that are still hard to understand, and I'm hoping
the document mentioned above is enough to shed some light on some of the more
esoteric concepts of Xanadu. I don't think we'll ever see a fully blown
Xanadu system ever, but there are still ideas lurking in it that deserve some
investigation.
