It was the most radical computer dream of the hacker era. Ted Nelson's
Xanadu project was supposed to be the universal, democratic hypertext library
that would help human life evolve into an entirely new form.
Instead, it sucked Nelson and his intrepid band of true believers into
what became the longest-running vaporware project in the history of computing
- a 30-year saga of rabid prototyping and heart-slashing despair. The amazing
epic tragedy.
By Gary Wolf
C H A P T E R O N E
T W O
T H R E E
F O U R
F I V E
S I X
S E V E N
E I G H T
N I N E
T E N
E L E V E N
T W E L V E
T H I R T E E N
F O U R T E E N
F I F T E E N
S I X T E E N
S E V E N T E E N
C H A P T E R O N E
- I said a brief prayer as Ted Nelson - hypertext guru and design
genius - took a scary left turn through the impolite traffic on Marin Boulevard
in Sausalito. Nelson's left hand was on the wheel, his right rested casually
on the back of the front seat. He arched his neck and looked in my direction
so as to be clearly heard. "I've been compiling a catalog of driving
maneuvers," he said. "It's one of my unfinished projects."
Nelson is a pale, angular, and energetic man who wears clothes with
lots of pockets. In these pockets he carries an extraordinary number of
items. What cannot fit in his pockets is attached to his belt. It is not
unusual for him to arrive at a meeting with an audio recorder and cassettes,
video camera and tapes, red pens, black pens, silver pens, a bulging wallet,
a spiral notebook in a leather case, an enormous key ring on a long, retractable
chain, an Olfa knife, sticky notes, assorted packages of old receipts,
a set of disposable chopsticks, some soy sauce, a Pemmican Bar, and a set
of white, specially cut file folders he calls "fangles" that
begin their lives as 8 1/2-by-11-inch envelopes, are amputated en masse
by a hired printer, and end up as integral components in Nelson's unique
filing system. This system is an amusement to his acquaintances until they
lend him something, at which point it becomes an irritation. "If you
ask Ted for a book you've given him," says Roger Gregory, Nelson's
longtime collaborator and traditional victim, "he'll say, 'I
filed it, so I'll buy you a new one.'" For a while, Nelson wore
a purple belt constructed out of two dog collars, which pleased him immensely,
because he enjoys finding innovative uses for things.
Nelson's life is so full of unfinished projects that it might fairly
be said to be built from them, much as lace is built from holes or Philip
Johnson's glass house from windows. He has written an unfinished autobiography
and produced an unfinished film. His houseboat in the San Francisco Bay
is full of incomplete notes and unsigned letters. He founded a video-editing
business, but has not yet seen it through to profitability. He has been
at work on an overarching philosophy of everything called General Schematics,
but the text remains in thousands of pieces, scattered on sheets of paper,
file cards, and sticky notes.
All the children of Nelson's imagination do not have equal stature.
Each is derived from the one, great, unfinished project for which he has
finally achieved the fame he has pursued since his boyhood. During one
of our many conversations, Nelson explained that he never succeeded as
a filmmaker or businessman because "the first step to anything I ever
wanted to do was Xanadu."
Xanadu, a global hypertext publishing system, is the longest-running
vaporware story in the history of the computer industry. It has been in
development for more than 30 years. This long gestation period may not
put it in the same category as the Great Wall of China, which was under
construction for most of the 16th century and still failed to foil invaders,
but, given the relative youth of commercial computing, Xanadu has set a
record of futility that will be difficult for other companies to surpass.
The fact that Nelson has had only since about 1960 to build his reputation
as the king of unsuccessful software development makes Xanadu interesting
for another reason: the project's failure (or, viewed more optimistically,
its long-delayed success) coincides almost exactly with the birth of hacker
culture. Xanadu's manic and highly publicized swerves from triumph to bankruptcy
show a side of hackerdom that is as important, perhaps, as tales of billion-dollar
companies born in garages.
Among people who consider themselves insiders, Nelson's Xanadu is sometimes
treated as a joke, but this is superficial. Nelson's writing and presentations
inspired some of the most visionary computer programmers, managers, and
executives - including Autodesk Inc. founder John Walker - to pour millions
of dollars and years of effort into the project. Xanadu was meant to be
a universal library, a worldwide hypertext publishing tool, a system to
resolve copyright disputes, and a meritocratic forum for discussion and
debate. By putting all information within reach of all people, Xanadu was
meant to eliminate scientific ignorance and cure political misunderstandings.
And, on the very hackerish assumption that global catastrophes are caused
by ignorance, stupidity, and communication failures, Xanadu was supposed
to save the world.
At the end of our brief but hair-raising journey toward lunch, Nelson's
battered 1970 Ford LTD came to a halt in front of The Spinnaker, a staid
restaurant on the Sausalito pier. As we sat down at a table overlooking
the bay, Nelson remarked that he could row his kayak from his houseboat
to The Spinnaker, and the reference to water reminded him of his incomplete
autobiography. "There's a very nice opening page there," he said,
"where I talk about being in a rowboat with my grandfather rowing
- and my grandmother - and running my hands, letting my hands trail in
the water, when I was 4 or 5."
As with everything else in his life, Nelson's conversation is controlled
by his aversion to finishing. There are no full stops in the flow of his
speech, only commas, dashes, ellipses.
"And I remember thinking about the particles in the water, but
I thought of them as places, and how they would separate around my fingers
and reconnect on the other side, and how this constant separation and reconnection
and perpetual change into new arrangements was - "
Suddenly, the monologue stopped, and Nelson reached into his cache of
equipment. He retrieved his own cassette recorder, tested it, and turned
the microphone toward himself. "OK, I'm at The Spinnaker," he
continued, "talking about the old hand-in-the-water story and how
the sense of the separation and reconnection of the places in the water
made such an impression on me, and how all the relationships were constantly
changing - and you could hardly hold onto it - you could, you could not,
you couldn't really visualize or express the myriad of relationships."
The chaotic, ephemeral eddies under his grandfather's rowboat are a
perfect image of Nelson's style of thought. I was already taping our conversation,
but Nelson clearly wanted his own record. Not because he was concerned
about being quoted correctly, but because his tape recorder and video camera
are weapons in an unending battle against amnesia. The inventor suffers
from an extreme case of Attention Deficit Disorder, a recently named psychological
syndrome whose symptoms include unusual sensitivity to interruption.
If he is stopped in the middle of anything, he forgets it instantly.
Only by running his own tape recorder could Nelson be confident that his
words would not float off, irrecoverably, into the atmosphere.
Nelson's anxiety about forgetting is complicated by the drugs he takes.
For his ADD, Nelson takes Cylert; for his agitation, he takes Prozac; for
sleeplessness, he takes Halcion. Halcion can produce aphasia: during our
lunch, Nelson sometimes found himself groping for a common word in the
middle of a sentence. But for the most part, he was fluent, and he took
pleasure in the aptness of his own phrases. Although inconvenienced by
his disorder, Nelson is nonetheless proud of it. "Attention Deficit
Disorder was coined by regularity chauvinists," he remarked. "Regularity
chauvinists are people who insist that you have got to do the same thing
every time, every day, which drives some of us nuts. Attention Deficit
Disorder - we need a more positive term for that. Hummingbird
mind, I should think."
Xanadu, the ultimate hypertext information system, began as Ted Nelson's
quest for personal liberation. The inventor's hummingbird mind and his
inability to keep track of anything left him relatively helpless. He wanted
to be a writer and a filmmaker, but he needed a way to avoid getting lost
in the frantic multiplication of associations his brain produced. His great
inspiration was to imagine a computer program that could keep track of
all the divergent paths of his thinking and writing. To this concept of
branching, nonlinear writing, Nelson gave the name hypertext.
Although the concept of hypertext made Nelson legendary in programming
circles, he is not a programmer. "I have a terrific math problem,"
Nelson said. "I still can't add up a checkbook: I can add a column
of figures five times, get four different answers, and none of them will
be right. I'm very accident-prone and extremely impatient. I can't work
my Macintosh - I have three that are completely unfunctional and one is
marginally functional."
"I never got past the calculus," he added, pausing to pull
out a video camera, which he focused on the notebook next to his plate.
"Why are you filming your notebook," I asked.
"I was just trying to get this thing going," he answered.
Satisfied that the camera was running, Nelson briefly panned it around
the room. Then he set it down and returned to his lecture. His lunch, a
large plate of pasta and seafood, had long ago been delivered, tasted,
and forgotten.
Nelson has never catalogued his thousands of hours of audio- and videotape.
This would be impossible, since they are coextensive with his waking life,
and it would also be unnecessary, since he has no intention of viewing
or studying them. He rents several storage spaces around the San Francisco
Bay area, all packed with materials he is leaving for future generations
to decipher, and he prays that when scholars get around to examining his
vast and vastly disorganized oeuvre, they will have the necessary
digital technology to analyze and follow it. This technology, he insists,
is Xanadu.
Were Xanadu merely the private obsession of a talented iconoclast, the
piles of papers and deteriorating magnetic reels in Nelson's many overflowing
lockers could simply be carted off to a dump. But the inventor is probably
right in his prediction that Xanadu's strange story will prove to be an
important chapter in the history of technology. Out of Nelson's discombobulation
was born one of the most powerful designs of the 20th century. And Xanadu's
goals - a universal library, a global information index, and a computerized
royalty system - were shared by many of the smartest programmers of the
first hacker generation.
The story of Ted Nelson's Xanadu is the story of the dawn of the information
age. Like the mental patient in Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow who
believes he is the Second World War - feeling a great burst of rosy health
when The Blitz comes and a terrible pinching headache at the Battle of
the Bulge - Nelson, with his unfocused energy, his tiny attention span,
his omnivorous fascination with trivia, and his commitment to recording
incidents whose meaning he will never analyze, is the human embodiment
of the information explosion.
Nelson records everything and remembers nothing. Xanadu was to have
been his cure. To assist in the procedure, he called upon a team of professionals,
some of whom also happened to be his closest friends and disciples.
In the end, the patient survived the operation. But it nearly killed
the doctors.
C H A P T E R T W O
- In conversation, Nelson is by turns reproachful and gloating.
A dreamy, unathletic child raised by elderly grandparents in Greenwich
Village, Nelson devoted his youth to studying the art of strategy, and
learned to pick up a serious weapon, such as a rock or pole, when threatened
by neighborhood bullies. As a grad student at Harvard, Nelson would one
day study strategy with Thomas Schelling, a renowned theorist, but as a
child, his methods were instinctive. For instance, in second grade, Nelson
invented a new way of crossing the street: when arriving at a busy thoroughfare,
he would dramatically turn his back on traffic and step with theatrical
nonchalance off the sidewalk. Drivers, frightened, would slam on their
brakes.
Nelson's heroes were famous non-conformists and businessmen, including
Buckminster Fuller, Bertrand Russell, Walt Disney, H. L. Mencken, and Orson
Welles. The inventor was, by his own account, a brilliant child whose speech
was unusually grammatical and whose wise pronouncements would cause adults
to fall silent. Nelson's father - who kept in intermittent contact with
his son - worked as a movie director (he made Requiem for a Heavyweight
and Soldier Blue among other films), and inspired the younger Nelson
to begin his own (unfinished) motion picture epic, The Epiphany of Slocum
Furlow. Of his actress mother, Nelson says only that they do not communicate
and have not spoken in a long time.
Nelson's hatred of conventional structure made him difficult to educate.
Bored and disgusted by school, he once plotted to stab his seventh-grade
teacher with a sharpened screwdriver, but lost his nerve at the last minute
and instead walked out of the classroom, never to return. On his long walk
home, he came up with the four maxims that have guided his life: most people
are fools, most authority is malignant, God does not exist, and everything
is wrong. Nelson loves these maxims and repeats them often. They lead him
to sympathize, in every discussion, with the rejected idea and the discounted
option.
By the time Nelson reached college, his method of combating the regularity
chauvinists was quite sophisticated; he put his teachers off with the theories
of writer Alfred Korzybski, who denounced all categories as misleading.
But this hatred of categories did not produce in Nelson a fuzzy, be-here-now
mysticism. On the contrary, Nelson loved words, which were tools for memory,
but he hated the way that traditional writing and editing imposed a false
and limiting order. Nelson had no interest in the smooth, progressive narratives
encased in books. He wanted everything to be preserved in all its chaotic
flux, so that it could be reconstructed as needed.
Nelson, a lonely child raised in an unconventional family, became a
rebel against forgetting, and a denier of all forms of loss and grief.
(Some of Nelson's disciples would one day take this war against loss even
further, and devote themselves to the development of cryonic technology
for the freezing and preservation of corpses.) Tormented by his own faulty
memory, Nelson developed the habit of asserting that only a technology
for the preservation of all knowledge could prevent the destruction of
life on Earth. The thought that some mental connection or relationship
might dissolve was unbearable. Not only was the constant churn and dispersal
of his own thoughts personally devastating, but the general human failure
to remember was, Nelson thought, suicidal on a global scale, for it condemned
humanity to an irrational repetition of its mistakes.
C H A P T E R T H R E E
- Nelson earned a BA in philosophy from Swarthmore, and in 1960
became a graduate student at Harvard. Hypertext was invented during his
first year at Harvard, when Nelson attempted, as a term project, to create
a "writing system" that allowed users to store their work, change
it, and print it out. In contrast to the first experimental word processors,
Nelson's design included features for comparing alternate versions of text
side by side, backtracking through sequential versions, and revision by
outline. Establishing a habit that would persist, Nelson failed to finish
the coding, and had to take an incomplete for the course.
Although Nelson had originally intended to get a PhD in social relations,
his attempt to finish his term project soon took precedence over other
course work. Simultaneously, a cliqué of Harvard researchers was
trying to create programs that would replace routine teaching chores with
computerized processes.
Nelson considered this linear, mechanical approach to what was then
called computer-aided instruction an insult to both students and computers,
and he urged the adoption of a system that would let students explore academic
material along a variety of alternate paths. He called for a system based
on "nonsequential writing."
The word hypertext was coined by Nelson and published in a paper
delivered to a national conference of the Association for Computing Machinery
in 1965. Adding to his design for a nonsequential writing tool, Nelson
proposed a feature called "zippered lists," in which elements
in one text would be linked to related or identical elements in other texts.
Nelson's two interests, screen editing and nonsequential writing, were
merging. With zippered lists, links could be made between large sections,
small sections, whole pages, or single paragraphs. The writer and reader
could manufacture a unique document by following a set of links between
discrete documents that were "zipped" together.
Many precedents for the idea of hypertext existed in literature and
science. The
Talmud, for instance, is a sort of hypertext, with blocks of commentary
arranged in concentric rectangles around the page. So are scholarly footnotes,
with their numbered links between the main body of the text and supplementary
scholarship.
In July 1945, long before Nelson turned his attention to electronic
information systems, Vannevar
Bush published an essay titled "As We May Think" in The
Atlantic Monthly, which described a hypothetical system of information
storage and retrieval called "memex." Memex would allow readers
to create personal indexes to documents, and to link passages from different
documents together with special markers. While Bush's description was purely
speculative, he gave a brilliant and influential preview of some of the
features Nelson would attempt to realize in Xanadu.
The inventor's original hypertext design predicted most of the essential
components of today's hypertext systems. Nonetheless, his talk to the Association
for Computing Machinery had little impact. There was a brief burst of interest
in this strange researcher, but although his ideas were intriguing, Nelson
lacked the technical knowledge to prove that it was possible to build the
system he envisioned.
The new hypertext prophet had difficulty finding a place to preach.
During the next four years, Nelson bounced around among a number of companies
and research programs. Hired by the publishing giant Harcourt, Brace to
advise them about computer-based business opportunities, he puzzled the
executives with his radical pronouncements about the imminent overthrow
of everything. Meanwhile, he put off computer scientists by taking every
opportunity to inform them that they failed to understand the earth-shattering
significance of their work. Despite these misfirings, the inventor's private
exploration of hypertext continued. He moved quickly into the most complex
theoretical territory, asking questions that still challenge hypertext
designers today. For instance, if you change a document, what happens to
all the links that go in and out? Can you edit a document but preserve
its links? What happens when you follow a link to a paragraph that has
been erased?
Computers in the '60s were giant machines, accessible to amateurs mainly
in university computer centers, where students could divert themselves
from their science homework with primitive question-and-answer games. But
the trend toward smaller and faster digital tools was already apparent
to insiders, some of whom wondered how computers could handle basic, personal
information tasks, such as editing a term paper. In 1969, Nelson was hanging
around Brown University, where an early word-processing tool was under
development. The Brown project focused on a system that would output paper,
but Nelson believed that paper was hopelessly retrograde and that the native
territory of hypertext was on the screen, not the page. Later that year,
Nelson got permission from the publishers of Vladimir Nabokov's Pale
Fire to use the elaborately annotated parody in a hypertext demonstration.
The idea, like most of Nelson's contributions, was rejected by the sponsors
of the Brown experiment. Nelson was bitter over the obstruction of his
work. "Thus progress must wait," he later wrote, "for the
halt and lame to catch up."
Nelson's characteristic anger both sustained and sabotaged him during
these hard, post-college years. His most productive stretch of short-term
employment may have come in 1967, while he was working for Harcourt, Brace.
Although he failed to make any technical advances, he did coin a powerful
trademark. Impressed by the literary employees of the publishing house,
and wanting to impress them in return, he christened his hypertext system
Xanadu.
It was a name of uncanny exactitude. Xanadu is the elaborate palace
in Orson
Welles's Citizen Kane, modeled on William Randolph Hearst's
San Simeon mansion and stocked with relics and art objects from around
the world. It is half museum and half mausoleum, a repository of the world's
culture that is also a work of mourning for a lost childhood. But before
Orson Welles appropriated the name, Xanadu was the image of literary vaporware
conjured by Samuel Coleridge in his 1797 fragment "Kubla
Khan."
In his famous tale of the poem's origin, Coleridge claimed to have woken
from a narcotic reverie with hundreds of lines of poetry in his head. As
he was about to transcribe them, he was interrupted by a visitor, and when
he returned to his writing table, the vivid oneiric composition had evaporated.
In his preface to the fragment that remained, Coleridge lamented:
Then all the charm
Is broken - all that phantom-world so fair
Vanishes, and a thousand circlets spread,
And each mis-shape[s] the other....
The Coleridge fragment haunts Nelson's grand hypertext design, just
as it haunted and inspired Orson Welles. In the name Xanadu was
a prescient flash of the years of remarkable heartbreak that lay ahead.
C H A P T E R F O U R
- Had Nelson been able to delve into the technical reasons for
which computer people found his plans for Xanadu unconvincing, he might
have been too discouraged to continue. The kinds of programs he was talking
about required enormous memory and processing power. Even today, the technology
to implement a worldwide Xanadu network does not exist. Back in the '70s,
when Nelson was still waging the first phase of his campaign, even simple
word-processing programs required users to share time on large mainframe
computers. The notion of a worldwide network of billions of quickly accessible
and interlinked documents was absurd, and only Nelson's ignorance of advanced
software permitted him to pursue this fantasy. The inventor was like a
vaudeville performer practicing an acrobatic routine on the edge of an
unseen cliff. A look into the abyss would doubtless have sent him tumbling.
Other computer people were not as boastfully buoyant. To find help,
Nelson was forced to go outside official channels. The first disciples
he acquired belonged to a group of hackers known as the R.E.S.I.S.T.O.R.S.,
which stood for Radically Emphatic Students Interested in Science, Technology,
and Other Research Studies. Unlike the mainstream programmers Nelson encountered,
the Resistors shared Nelson's sense of humor, his mischief, and his lack
of respect for authority. An added benefit was that they didn't need salaries,
since most of them still lived with their parents. The Resistors were members
of a computer club in Princeton, New Jersey, and their average age was
about 15. Nelson's influence over some of them was lifelong. Almost 20
years later, one of the Resistors, Lauren Sarno, who was 14 when she met
Nelson, would become his personal assistant. In 1987, Sarno would spend
thousands of hours reconstructing Nelson's masterpiece, Computer Lib,
so it could be reprinted by Microsoft Press.
The Resistors appreciated Nelson because he took their advice seriously.
"Some people are too proud to ask children for information,"
Nelson preached in Computer Lib. "This is dumb. Information
is where you find it." The teenage Resistors spent quite a bit of
time driving around with Nelson in his car, telling hackerish jokes and
scheming to transform civilization. Their favorite activity was wordplay.
One of Nelson's Resistor anecdotes describes an afternoon when he was cruising
through Princeton with his co-conspirators and growing increasingly annoyed
with the loud contradictory instructions coming from the back seat. "I
demand triple redundancy in the directions," Nelson said.
"Right up ahead you turn right right away," piped up one of
the teenagers, promptly.
A picture from that era shows a grinning, boyish Nelson in a white shirt
and tie, with hair down to his collar, sitting at the wheel of a car full
of kids. He looks enormously pleased.
While continuing to work with the high schoolers, Nelson acquired some
money from an individual investor and used it to recruit Cal Daniels, a
programmer at a company called Minicomputer Systems Inc., as well as a
young Swarthmore student who knew Fortran. Nelson, who regularly commuted
between his apartment in Manhattan, the Swarthmore campus, and Daniels's
large house in Queens, recalls this era as one of "talking the system,
hashing details." By all accounts, it was mostly talking. But during
a rare period of fierce programming, the three collaborators created an
interesting data structure that governed the movement of huge sections
of text in and out of the computer's memory. They called their invention
"the enfilade."
The dictionary defines enfilade,
which can be a noun or a verb, as the firing of a gun in a sweeping motion
along the length of a target. The word has etymological links to threads
and files, as well as to an arrangement of rooms with doorways in
line with each other, and to a vista seen between columns or trees.
Unfortunately, beyond the dictionary, no further clues about the nature
of the enfilade are available: the discovery is one of Xanadu's closely
guarded trade secrets, and all the people who have worked on it are prohibited
from revealing its inner nature. This reticence has naturally produced
doubt about the enfilade's world-historical significance. When asked skeptically
why he won't allow anything about the invention to be published, Nelson
responded with quick anger. "Because it is still hot shit," he
says.
The discovery of the enfilade and the pledge made by its discoverers
to keep it secret marked a turning point in the personality of Xanadu.
The first real work had been achieved, and the first concession to secrecy
had been made. Xanadu was now more than a grand vision and more than a
set of original ideas - it was now a proprietary software package, with
its design concepts tied up in a product and its intellectual influence
bound tightly to the vicissitudes of the market.
In 1972, Cal Daniels completed the first demonstration version of the
software. Daniels wrote some primitive Xanadu code in a now-defunct programming
language that ran on Nelson's rented Nova computer. However, before he
could show a running Xanadu system to any potential backers, Nelson unexpectedly
ran out of cash and was forced to return the Nova. The programmers had
working code but no machine. (Later, they would have machines but no working
code.) Like Nelson's failure to complete his college hypertext project
in the mid-1960s, this bankruptcy is a Xanadu milestone, for it established
the coincidence of near-success and sudden penury as one of Xanadu's ineluctable
motifs.
After this defeat, Nelson moved further and further toward the fringe
of the computer industry. In 1973, he landed a job at the University of
Illinois in Chicago, where he instantly and typically discovered that he
couldn't get along with his colleagues. With the prospect of winning respect
from computer officialdom fading, Nelson moved in a new direction. He took
some time off from attempting to build his system. He also took some time
off from incessantly talking about it. He began to reach beyond the range
of his voice by appealing to a more general public.
His switch was well timed. When the inventor first got a hint of the
territories beyond the mainframe horizon, his plan had been to arrive first
and install a decent information network. But as the promoters of American
towns long ago discovered, it is not necessary to build anything to profit
from the settlement of a new territory. You just have to survey the land
and begin selling parcels to wishful pioneers. Nelson had failed to construct
his information infrastructure, but he had designed a very nice picture
of the future.
Isolated at the University of Illinois, Nelson began to write an enthusiastic
tome that was part gospel, part political pamphlet, and part real-estate
brochure extolling the benefits of life on the digital frontier. When he
started, Nelson expected to produce about 40 pages of typewritten text,
on regular, 8½, 2-by-11-inch paper. By the summer of 1974, after
18 months of manic labor, culminating in weeks of round-the-clock cutting
and pasting, Nelson had a rambling, jumbled 1,200-page manuscript on his
hands.
C H A P T E R F I V E
- Any nitwit can understand computers, and many do," announced
Nelson in the 1974 introduction to the first edition of Computer
Lib. His opus was really two books, attached to each other upside
down and backward, like the old Ace Doubles or, as Nelson enjoys pointing
out, like The Italian/Polish Joke Book. One cover showed a revolutionary
fist inside a computer. When readers flipped the book over, they saw the
cover of Dream Machines, decorated with an airborne man in a Superman
cape reaching out with his finger to touch a screen. The book was large
- 11 inches wide and 16 inches tall - and contained a 300,000-word manifesto
of the digital revolution. The print was tiny, and the layout confusing.
Nelson wrote out his rough draft, which consisted of hundreds of individual
rants, on a typewriter; then cut and pasted the rants together onto sheets
of cardboard; took the sheets to a printer; and returned some weeks later
to pick up cartons of books. When he discovered that about a third of the
books had their pages in the wrong order, he had the printer unbind the
flawed copies and recollate and rebind them. Between 1974 and 1987, when
Computer Lib was republished by Microsoft Press, Nelson sold at
least 100 copies of his manifesto every month, sometimes many more.
An expression of the author's encyclopedic passion, Computer Lib
contains whatever enraged or inspired Nelson during the months he wrote
it, including population statistics, hacker psychology, the evils of IBM,
holograms, musical notation, lists of places to rent a PDP-8, Watergate,
and how to program in Trac, among other topics. These remarks "didn't
fit anywhere else, so they might as well go here," is a typical Computer
Lib transition. The model for the book was Stewart Brand's 1969 counterculture
classic, The Whole Earth Catalog, but the design of Computer
Lib was even more idiosyncratic. There was no index or table of contents.
Specific quotes or sections were impossible to find. Although full of reference
material, it could not be used as a reference without being read enough
times to memorize it. Which, of course, is exactly what many young hackers
did.
Dream Machines, the literal flip side of Computer Lib,
was largely about the transformation of the arts through computers, but
it included a relatively brief description of Xanadu. In the years since
1965, when he first attempted to make Xanadu work, the idea had grown enormously.
By 1974, locally networked computers had appeared, and Nelson saw a global
computer network as the natural environment for a hypertext system. Over
a network, linked documents, version comparison, and non-sequential writing
would create a "docuverse" capable of storing and representing
the artistic and scientific legacy of humanity.
In Dream Machines, Nelson pitched the idea of Xanadu information
franchises, where data shoppers could access material from the global storage
system. This pitch for what he called the Xanadu Stands included a sketch
of the interior, complete with snack bar, and the lyrics for a Xanadu singing
commercial:
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.
The Xanadu franchises were silly, but they contained a solution to a
genuinely difficult problem. If there was to be a universal library of
electronic documents, who would pay for it? Nelson's answer was to imagine
a corporate information entity that resembled McDonald's, a chain of franchises
whose operating costs were paid by their individual owners out of revenue
from the information-starved masses.
"The franchisee," wrote Nelson cheerfully, "has to put
up the money for the computers, the scopes, the adorable purple enamel
building, the johns, and so on; as a Xanadu franchisee he gets the whole
turnkey system and certain responsibilities in the overall Xanadu network
- of which he is a member." Nelson hinted that this system, the software
on which the structure of the fantasy was to rest, was nearly complete.
Computer Lib was written as a popular primer, but its most profound
effect was on computer programmers, who needed little persuasion about
the value of computers. Its tone - energetic, optimistic, inexhaustible,
confused - matched theirs exactly. Having set out to appeal to the general
public, Nelson managed to publish an insider's bible and highly intimate
guide to hacker culture.
What most touched the hackers who read Computer Lib was not the
instructions on how to write a program loop in APL but something more radical.
Computer Lib assigned to programmers a noble role in the battle
for humanity's future, and it recruited them for the rebellion they were
witnessing on their college campuses. When programmers read Computer
Lib, they could discern a portrait of the book's ideal reader - an
anxious, skeptical, interested, sensible, free-thinking citizen who wanted
better digital tools. At the time of Computer Lib, this popular
audience for news about the digital revolution did not exist. But the people
to whom Computer Lib became a bible wished that this audience existed.
Computer Lib reflected back to computer programmers an idealized
image of themselves. In this sense, it was a far subtler book than Nelson
set out to write.
C H A P T E R S I X
- Roger
Gregory, Ted Nelson's most loyal collaborator, is a sad man. He suffers
from a common, disabling ailment that Abraham Lincoln, who was similarly
afflicted, called "the hypos." His sadness grows so acute at
times that he becomes incapable of working, and his fits of black sorrow
go back many, many years.
When he first heard of Ted Nelson, Gregory was a science fiction fan
working in a used-computer store in Ann Arbor, Michigan, called Neuman
Computer Exchange. He had stringy hair and wore dirty clothes, and he tended
to argue violently with people he felt were wrong. His job was annoying
because he never got to play with any functioning "toys" - the
refrigerator-size cabinets that contained the latest digital machinery.
As soon as Gregory got some hopelessly wrecked piece of computer equipment
into decent condition, Al Neuman, his boss, would sell it off. Gregory
did his hacking in various computer labs associated with the University
of Michigan, and he belonged to a social group - the Ann Arbor Computing
Club - whose membership overlapped with the local science fiction club.
Gregory was introduced to Nelson's work by Michael McClary, a programmer
friend as well as a reader of Computer Lib. The year was 1974, and
in the rest of America, the counterculture was in its final paroxysm of
false triumph. The revolution had come late to computer scientists, but
it did come, causing many to shed their white shirts and pocket protectors
and question the servility of their discipline, which was largely devoted
to making money and waging war. McClary, who like Gregory was a fan of
Robert Heinlein, offered Gregory a ride to an annual science fiction convention
in Washington, DC. As they puttered over the Appalachias in an ancient
Ford Galaxy loaded with three other science fiction bums, McClary preached
the Xanadu gospel. Nelson's idea, McClary explained, was that the computer
was the resource to get into the hands of the people. With a global publishing
system, the need for printing presses could be eliminated. Censorship would
be difficult, if not impossible. Plus, such a system would be extremely
fun to build. McClary gave Gregory a brochure that advertised Nelson's
new book.
The inventor's meme, delivered secondhand, couldn't have found a more
perfect host. Gregory had exactly the skills Nelson lacked: an intimate
knowledge of hardware, a good amount of programming talent, and an obsessive
interest in making machines work.
Gregory intended to call Nelson, but destiny moved more quickly: the
repairman had hardly returned to Ann Arbor when Nelson telephoned the Neuman
Computer Exchange and asked the person who answered the phone to trade
a thousand copies of Computer Lib for a used PDP-11.
The PDP-11, from the Digital Equipment Corporation, was a coveted machine.
It was the original computer to run a new programming language called C,
which was on its way to becoming the hackers' standard. Gregory, as it
happened, didn't have any spare PDP-11s at his disposal. But the repairman
took the opportunity to question some of Nelson's blithe predictions in
Computer Lib, and Nelson, in response, unleashed his glib and bitter
tirade against the conservative ignoramuses in the computer business.
Gregory, whose quick rage once led him to grab a shotgun from two would-be
burglars and chase them from his door, had finally found an interlocutor
who wasn't afraid to match him outrage for outrage. Gregory's dismissive
contempt can be piercing, but Nelson's speculative mania is indeflatable.
Over the next few years, Gregory spent hundreds of dollars on long-distance
telephone discussions of the hypertext project.
Did Nelson realize at the time that he had met Xanadu's second parent?
Probably not. The inventor scattered his ideas as widely as possible, with
little care about where they landed. But as the decades passed, it would
be Gregory who oversaw the attempt to transform Xanadu into a real product.
He never received much public notice, but through all the project's painful
deaths and rebirths, Gregory's commitment to Nelson's dream of a universal
hypertext library never waned. If Ted Nelson is Xanadu's profligate father,
Roger Gregory is Xanadu's devoted mother, and in retrospect, his role appears
to have been intertwined with a terrible element of sacrifice.
C H A P T E R S E V E N
- Soon after Computer Lib was released, Nelson fled the
unfriendly confines of the University of Illinois and found refuge at Swarthmore,
on the same quiet, undergraduate campus where, in the '60s, he first incubated
his hypertext designs. Swarthmore had offered him a nondepartmental position
teaching his own work; Nelson taught classes in the social issues pertaining
to technology and design.
While he was at Swarthmore, another important disciple appeared.
In 1976, Mark Miller, an insecure 19-year-old, came to address a classroom
full of Ted Nelson's students. He was nervous. Miller had read Computer
Lib the year before, when he was a freshman at Yale, and the book had
filled his head with reveries about the digital future. Intensely interested
in computers, Miller hoped to make some small contribution to a society
that would be run on rational, libertarian, and scientific principles.
Nelson's work, which described a global community united by perfect information,
seemed the most important signpost yet on the road to this utopia.
As a guest lecturer in Nelson's class, Miller ran through his ideas
for a Xanadu-like software system. Afterward, he was approached by one
of the students, Stuart Greene. Miller asked Greene what the reaction to
his ideas had been. Not so good, Greene informed him. As always, the class
had listened in dumb incomprehension. They seldom understood what Nelson
was talking about, and when Miller launched into a similar enthusiastic
tirade, their response, Greene laughed, was "Oh, no, we can't believe
there's another one!"
The Yale student was not discouraged. A disheveled mathematician - part
goofball, part Wunderkind - Miller loved pointing out that his name
was a pun on computer programming: after all, software code consists of
marks, and milling means churning or grinding. A photograph
shows Miller with a smirk on his face, a shirt pocket full of pens, and
a pair of Mickey Mouse ears on his head. Nelson's rejection of human forgetfullness
seemed right to Miller, who hoped to create a system that allowed his consciousness
to be captured in a computer program, and thus achieve immortality. Miller's
middle name was Samuel, which he spelled $amuel, in tribute to his faith
in the power of the marketplace to fill all human needs.
Nelson's book brought him growing acclaim, and in 1979, he decided it
was time to gather his disciples. He called upon Roger Gregory to lead
the effort. Although Gregory was in Ann Arbor, Nelson insisted that everybody
move to Swarthmore so he could exercise his influence at close range. Obediently,
Gregory rented a house and invited the other programmers to join him. Mark
Miller returned to Pennsylvania, where the Xanadu devotees aimed to finish
the project in a single, serious summer of coding.
That summer was Xanadu's golden age. During long afternoons and evenings,
the programmers sat on the porch and scrawled on blackboards, musing over
the difficulties of making hypertext code that really worked. Although
they had planned to program the system during the three months Miller had
off from Yale, they spent most of their time talking about data structures
and reworking the design. The chief difficulty was creating a way to move
data quickly in and out of the computer's memory. Since hypertext links
could connect infinitely many documents, every bit of writing in the system
had to be instantly accessible. Nelson became convinced that they were
making major contributions to computer science. He believed that the newest
versions of the data-search algorithms, dubbed "General Enfilade Theory,"
allowed the Xanadu system to grow forever without its performance degrading
unacceptably.
Most computer scientists would have been suspicious of these claims,
but this hardly bothered these programmers, who were working in an atmosphere
of friendly competition and camaraderie. They may not have always agreed
with Nelson's aggressively optimistic predictions, but they shared a feeling
that Gregory's large, messy home in Swarthmore was nurturing a social and
scientific revolution.
The question of computer performance was key. That summer, Gregory was
programming on a Sol 20, borrowed from a company called Processor Technologies.
Soon, he gave up trying to hammer the Sol into something more usable and
decided to buy a new Onyx, with a whopping 10-Mbyte disk. The Onyx also
had 128 Kbytes of RAM, which they later doubled to a screaming 256 Kbytes.
Looking back at the specifics of the endeavor, the approach of the Xanadu
programmers seems quixotic. Gregory and his colleagues were trying to build
a universal library on machines that could barely manage to edit and search
a book's worth of text.
"The summer went a little slower than we thought," remembers
Gregory. Greene, Miller, and Gregory made some headway in the design, and
in August, they wrote some code. But the real world began to press in on
them, and as summer waned, the crew went off in separate directions. There
were tasks to accomplish - educations to finish and careers to start -
and the Xanadu reverie could not be maintained.
Except, perhaps, by Gregory. In comparison with the Technicolor geography
of Xanadu, the landscape of Gregory's regular life was as flat as Kansas
farmland. While he knew how to fix and program computers pretty well, he
was not a computer scientist or an élite researcher, and his persistent
sadness compelled him to seek a destiny greater than tweaking corporate
and commercial machines. In managing his depression, Gregory found that
it helped to have something productive to do; the computer was always there,
and when he felt his sorrow well up, he knew he could sit in his chair,
stare at the screen, and begin to hack. By the summer of 1979, Gregory
had already wound himself up too deeply in the threads of Xanadu's alternate
universe to cut himself free. Gregory knew that if he was to escape, his
route would be through Xanadu, not away from it.
Come September, Gregory stayed in Pennsylvania and rented another house.
As programmers came and went, the house provided a frame for Xanadu's slow
progress. Working full time on outside consulting contracts to support
Xanadu and some 40 hours a week on the project itself, Gregory opened his
home to anybody he felt could contribute. Mark Miller had returned to Yale
to begin his senior year, but he stayed in touch and continued to offer
suggestions. Eric Hill, who had been around during the Swarthmore summer,
and Roland King both joined the household. Eric Drexler, a graduate student
obsessed with solar sails for space travel and microscopic machines, was
a frequent guest and friendly critic.
Having maxed out the Onyx, Gregory went searching for a new computer,
and in 1982 became the first individual not funded by a government or educational
institution to purchase a Sun. It was extremely expensive - US$26,000.
The serial number was 82. With the Sun and a new, 80-Mbyte hard drive,
which cost $10,000, the Xanadu code had its first decent home.
At the beginning of Xanadu's second decade of development, Nelson was
pleased with the project's caretakers. The last time he had come this close
to having a working prototype was in 1972, when time ran out on his rented
Nova. Now, the inventor's brainchild was more mature. Miller and Gregory
created an addressing system that used transfinite numbers, an arcane area
of calculus they had both studied in college. They called the new addresses
"tumblers";
the tumbler system allowed readers to create links to any arbitrary span
of bytes, whether or not the author had marked them. With tumblers, Miller
and Gregory could give a similar address to every document and fragment
of a document in Xanadu's sprawling domain of words, pictures, movies,
and sounds. The address would not only point the reader to the correct
machine, it would also indicate the author of the document, the version
of the document, the correct span of bytes, and the links associated with
these bytes.
Unfortunately, though the design was innovative and the algorithms interesting,
the Xanadu code was depressingly nonfunctional. As 1979 stretched into
1980, and 1980 into 1981, Nelson continued to lecture about the imminent
release of the greatest information software of all time. Xanadu, he promised,
would make the central concepts of computing - files, for example - obsolete.
In Xanadu, there would be no immutable files, only a mass of material that
could be organized according to the reader's preference.
Miller, the prodigy, failed to return to Gregory's house after graduating
from Yale in 1980. Instead, he moved to Datapoint, a hardware company based
in San Antonio, Texas, which was then the leader in networking technology.
With Stuart Greene already a Datapoint employee, Miller went on to work
at the company's advanced research lab, and the two were later joined by
Nelson. The move to Datapoint was a concession to the reality principle,
as well as an acknowledgment that the most important aspects of the Swarthmore
group's work so far had been design rather than coding. At Datapoint, the
Xanadu programmers could explore their ideas in a corporate setting that
offered the latest equipment and a decent paycheck.
Gregory continued to nurse the project along. After the Xanadu programming
team dissolved in the early '80s and Nelson moved to Texas, Gregory also
abandoned Pennsylvania. He returned to Michigan, where, for a while he
and some Xanadu kibitzers lived at the apartment of a friend. During another
period, Gregory and his fellow hackers camped out in a suburban crash pad,
with a sympathetic hippie couple who fed them, lent encouragement, and
helped them find jobs. Xanadu, after years of high hopes, had become a
charity case, dependent for its survival upon the kindness
of friends.
C H A P T E R E I G H T
- From its rosy expansion at the turn of the decade, the project
had, by 1984, collapsed into a constricted sphere of hackers clustered
around Roger Gregory. Despite its reduced scope, the hypertext dream still
possessed a powerful gravitational field. Few people who came in contact
with it could tear themselves completely free. Rather, programmers tended
to depart on elliptical orbits that took them far away and then, eventually,
brought them back.
For instance, Michael McClary, the programmer who introduced Gregory
to the concept of hypertext 10 years earlier, joined the Xanadu project
briefly after it returned to Michigan. McClary was quiet, hippieish and,
by the time he hooked up with Xanadu, an expert in writing long, complex
programs in C. His method was to take a few days to absorb the design,
plot out his approach carefully, and then implement his plan in a long
stretch of sustained concentration. According to his colleagues, McClary
took about three times as long as most programmers to come up with a first
version - but his first try usually worked.
When Gregory returned to Michigan from Pennsylvania, McClary noticed
that Gregory resisted suggestions to formalize Xanadu's business arrangements.
There were no contracts, no documents, and no organization. Gregory and
his irregular helpers took copious notes but never referred to them again.
Gregory held a meeting once a week to try to decide what was next, but
instead of addressing the programming requirements, the conversation would
wander aimlessly from snide personal attacks to grand philosophical speculations.
After witnessing the process for a few months, McClary got the impression
that he wasn't part of a software development team but of a sect in the
process of self-destruction. McClary also noticed that there was nothing
to enforce any claim that the hackers might have on the fruits of their
labors. When he asked about ownership, Gregory explained casually that
someday everybody would get a fair share. McClary watched as Gregory, succumbing
to his innate emotional volatility and disappointed by years of unsuccessful
labor, drove his associates away. McClary finally quit the project after
Gregory struck him during an argument.
Yet there were rays of hope. In 1987, Nelson revised Literary Machines,
a book-length description of hypertext he had first published in 1981.
The style of the book was pure Nelson: it had one Chapter Zero, seven Chapter
Ones, one Chapter Two, and seven Chapter Threes. In his introduction, Nelson
suggested that the reader begin with one of the Chapter Ones, then read
Chapter Two, then explore a Chapter Three, and then start again, passing
repeatedly through Chapter Two. He also provided a diagram, with the comment:
"Pretzel or infinity, it's up to you." The official title page
reads: Literary Machines: The Report On, And Of, Project Xanadu Concerning
World Processing, Electronic Publishing, Hypertext, Thinkertoys, Tomorrow's
Intellectual Revolution, and Certain Other Topics Including Knowledge,
Education and Freedom.
But there was no money to turn the elaborate design presented in Nelson's
book into something concrete. Even Roger Gregory was running out of steam.
With the exception of Gregory, all the major Xanadu programmers were intensely
involved in other work. By the mid-1980s, the most rational hope for Xanadu
was that the project would exercise its power indirectly, through the work
of Miller, Greene, and others in companies scattered around the world.
Miller, by now a rising professional, moved to Xerox PARC, the source of
many of the personal computer industry's most important designs.
For Xanadu's two parents, things were more difficult. Gregory, still
clinging to the incomplete collection of Xanadu code, made regular presentations
to possible funders, but could not spark their interest. Nelson was living
in San Antonio and, after Datapoint collapsed in a financial scandal, he
began running out of money.
Enormously bitter, he was furious at the setbacks but helpless to grieve
and move on. Around this time, Nelson contemplated suicide and got as far
as holding the pills in his hand. He ended his revised version of Literary
Machines with words of farewell: "We have held to ideals created
long ago, in different times and places, the very best ideals we could
find. We have carried these banners unstained to this new place, we now
plant them and hope to see them floating in the wind. But it is dark and
quiet and lonely here, and not yet dawn."
The Xanadu hackers may never have produced a working implementation
of their design, but they possessed a profound foreknowledge of the information
crisis soon to be produced by digital technology. They were dead-accurate
when they sketched a future of many-to-many communication, universal digital
publishing, links between documents, and the capacity for infinite storage.
When they started, they had been ahead of their time. But by the mid-1980s,
they were barely ahead of it.
C H A P T E R N I N E
- When Gayle Pergamit first heard about Xanadu, in about 1980,
she recognized that Nelson's concept and Gregory's tenacity could revolutionize
the software industry. She also recognized that the endeavor was foundering.
Pergamit's husband, Phil Salin, had written the studies that helped guide
the breakup of the Bell system. He was well informed about computers and
obsessed with the idea of electronic markets for information. During the
'80s, Salin was creating a computer network designed to allow the sale
and exchange of data and expertise. He worked closely with Pergamit, a
business consultant whose sympathetic nature and uncommon understanding
of programmers' wants and needs made her an ideal liaison between managers,
suppliers, and hackers. Pergamit sympathized with Nelson and Gregory's
quest, but she also saw that both, particularly Gregory, were in need of
help.
"At the time," Pergamit remembers, "you could open the
San Jose Mercury News and go through page after page after page
of want ads for computer programmers. And out there in Ann Arbor, programmers
couldn't find work. Forget funding - they couldn't even find work."
Pergamit and Salin begged Gregory to move west. Like Nelson, Gregory
hates to throw anything away, and the prospect of transferring his collection
of old computers and his thousands of books across the country was daunting.
But in 1983, he gave in, dragging with him the motley hardware on which
various parts of Xanadu had been hacked. Unfortunately, Pergamit and Salin's
analysis was only partially on target; although Gregory found work in Silicon
Valley, Xanadu languished.
Gregory, of course, would not admit failure. He maintained a life-support
system for Xanadu, including a post office box and a few items of printed
propaganda - like Xanadu's
employee roster, on which Ted Nelson was listed at the top as "Director"
and Roger Gregory was in second place as "System Anarchist";
Mark Miller was described as the "Hacker," Phil Salin was the
"Accelerator," and Gayle Pergamit was "Hidden Variable."
One member of the Xanadu roster held the title "Speaker-to-Bankers,"
but if he was speaking, the bankers weren't listening. Over the years,
Gregory had become a fixture at programmers conventions, where he displayed
an unconvincing Xanadu demo. His natural habitat was at the Hackers' conference,
a yearly, invitation-only conclave that started as an informal gathering
for people written about in Steven Levy's bestselling book Hackers.
Attendance at Hackers expanded over the years, and it became the chief
gathering of the unofficial computer élite.
During 1987, the year of Hackers 3.0, Gregory was working, somewhat
grouchily, for Cirrus Logic. He took time off to attend the conclave, located
that fall at Camp Swig, a Jewish camp in Saratoga, California. The programmers
stayed in stilt-raised cabins and had their general sessions in a large,
rustic room with a stone fireplace. There were demonstrations of virtual
reality headgear, a Coca-Cola-powered battery, and a mobile robot named
Louis; there were also edifying sessions on viruses and worms, on neural
networks, on fractals, and, at 2:45 on Saturday afternoon, on the question:
"Can a Hacker Still Make It BIG?"
One of the attendees was a hacker who had recently made it very big.
Perched stiffly by an open window during one of the sessions, wearing an
open-collar, short-sleeve shirt and dark-rimmed glasses, was John
Walker, the legendary founder of Autodesk. Walker was still at the
helm of the company he founded, whose sales had grown from $15,000 in 1983
to more than $54 million in 1987. He knew little about Gregory's labor
of love, but he had heard of Xanadu.
Roger Gregory had had many conversations with many investors over the
years. The investors would talk to Gregory at a conference, become interested,
make an appointment, visit the site where Xanadu happened to be located,
view the bits and pieces of the system that Gregory had managed to cobble
together, go back to their companies, write memos describing what they
saw, and never talk to Gregory again.
Walker was different. He once described Autodesk as an organization
composed of people who would rather write a book than spend 10 minutes
on the phone. Walker realized the Xanadu code was not finished, but he
also noticed that Xanadu had never had the benefit of a serious, commercial
development effort. He suspected that with the help of Autodesk, which
was founded to give its original partners, themselves programmers, a way
to produce and sell their tools, Xanadu might be transformed from a cult
into a company. And when the founder of Autodesk wrote an enthusiastic
note about Xanadu, his executives were inclined to pay attention.
Walker's overture was followed by a period of intense negotiations.
Phil Salin and Roger Gregory spent months working with Autodesk's attorneys.
Immediately, the Xanadu crew's casual business arrangements came back to
haunt them. Ted Nelson insisted that no sale or license to Autodesk interfere
with the inventor's grand scheme for a universal library and publishing
system. Nelson wanted to ensure that if Autodesk had a working product,
he would have complete freedom to use it in his Xanadu roadside information
franchises.
Autodesk cared little about becoming the McDonald's of cyberspace; its
plans focused on commercial tools for sharing, distributing, and editing
documents. Still, it was not easy to craft a set of contracts establishing
both Nelson's freedom to use the Xanadu technology and Autodesk's ownership
of it. In the end, the solution Salin, Gregory, and Autodesk negotiated
was called The Silver Agreement, and it generously gave to Nelson the exclusive
right to build a royalty-based publishing system using any Xanadu technology
perfected by Gregory and Autodesk. Nelson had a right to the name Xanadu;
the new company, owned largely by Autodesk, was called Xanadu
Operating Company.
One benefit of The Silver Agreement was that it allowed the programmers
to pursue commercial applications of Xanadu under the direction of Autodesk,
without constant interference from their demanding founder. Nelson would
be given a prestigious title, "Autodesk Fellow," and an office
at Autodesk headquarters, but he would have no direct role in managing
the development of the software. This arrangement was important, for while
Nelson's presentations were inspiring, his high self-regard and his pronounced
difficulty organizing and finishing tasks made him an ineffective manager.
By granting Nelson an exclusive license to use Xanadu in any royalty-based
publishing scheme, Autodesk believed it was giving the inventor what he
wanted most while keeping hold of the most important commercial decisions
about what Xanadu would become and how it would be sold. In time, however,
the partners would discover ambiguities in The Silver Agreement. "With
the benefit of hindsight," said one former Xanadu executive, "I'd
say the lawyers who crafted that agreement should be shot."
Yet in 1988, the Autodesk deal was nothing but good news. On April 6,
John Walker issued a press release announcing that Autodesk would acquire
80 percent of Xanadu. Most of the rest of the company would be shared between
the programmers and various individuals who had funded Nelson and Gregory
over the years. Autodesk offered Gregory steady employment as well as sufficient
development support to see his long-delayed project to completion. And
Autodesk promised to have Xanadu to market within 18 months.
"In 1964," announced Walker, confidently, "Xanadu was
a dream in a single mind. In 1980, it was the shared goal of a small group
of brilliant technologists. By 1989, it will be a product. And by 1995,
it will begin to change the world."
Gregory had gone to Hackers 3.0 under a cloud. By the middle of the
following summer, he was a lead programmer in a software company whose
research budget was nearly a million dollars a year.
C H A P T E R T E N
- John Walker's Autodesk created the dominant software in the
field of computer-aided design. The Xanadu acquisition reflected Walker's
hope that Autodesk could also pioneer the fields of virtual reality, information
markets, and space exploration. Along with Xanadu, Autodesk bought Phil
Salin's information-exchange company, AMIX (American Information Exchange).
In a contemporary memo to his company, Walker preached to his colleagues:
"Reality isn't enough any more."
For Xanadu's programmers, Autodesk's 1988 investment reversed all the
vectors of the project's history. More than a half-dozen programmers regathered.
The flow of cash also turned around; suddenly Xanadu was supporting Gregory
instead of vice versa. Nelson, always a gadfly, was safely tucked away
inside Autodesk's Sausalito headquarters. The programmers' offices were
more than an hour down California Highway 280, in Palo Alto.
Always dependent on the support of friends and strangers, and used to
laboring on the fringes of unsympathetic institutions, the hackers of Xanadu
finally had a chance to establish their own working conditions and to build
an environment ideally suited to creative work. Gregory's response to this
freedom was touching. According to one of the programmers, his contract
with Autodesk gave him a budget that specifically ensured the office had
comfortable furniture and nutritious food.
Mark Miller gave himself up to Xanadu's pull and rejoined the project
full time. The new Xanadu site on Palo Alto's California Avenue was remodeled
to resemble the environment at Xerox PARC. The programmers' offices opened
onto a large common space, and the walls were covered with white board,
which quickly became a tangle of multicolored lines, words, circles, and
squiggles.
Gayle Pergamit helped Xanadu establish some basic accounting and purchasing
systems, but the programmers' attention was never focused on business details.
Rather, they took the opportunity to contact everybody they felt might
be able to assist them in their last, grand, 18-month push. Along with
Miller, Dean Tribble also came from Xerox PARC. Other programmers who had
contributed over the years, including Eric Hill and Roland King, joined
the team.
Using a combination of stock and salary, the Xanadu team also lured
Michael McClary to California. McClary had plenty of experience taking
obscure directions from technical managers and turning them into massive,
working programs in C. He abandoned his lucrative Michigan consulting practice
to rejoin the project he had left unfinished nearly 10 years before.
Xanadu's most unlikely new recruit was Marc
Stiegler, who became the project's manager. Stiegler was an even-tempered
software developer whose just-published science fiction novel, David's
Sling, presented a scenario in which a hypertext system saved the world.
After working for nine years in the software industry, Stiegler had earned
enough money to take some time off. But Xanadu, with its daunting record
of failure, enticed him nonetheless.
Before the Autodesk acquisition, Stiegler had met Nelson at a CD-ROM
conference sponsored by Microsoft, where he found himself in an audience
of 1,000 listening to a speaker he didn't recognize. He was looking at
a Xanadu flyer, which was absurdly amateurish, and he was listening to
Ted Nelson's presentation, which was manic. Stiegler's first impulse was
to laugh. Then, like so many earlier Xanadu recruits, he was touched by
something in Nelson's proposal that transcended plausibility. Through the
primitive medium of Xanadu's printed materials and Nelson's barely convincing
lecture, Stiegler thought he heard a call from the future. "I was
looking at this, frankly, crude flyer," he said, "and listening
to this guy talk about Xanadu, and I was sitting there thinking, you know,
if this guy can really pull it off, he's going to change the world. I looked
around at all the other people in business suits and I realized that I
was the only person in the room who understood."
As soon as Nelson was finished, Stiegler hurried over to the stage entrance,
where he found Nelson, better known than Stiegler realized, surrounded
by a dozen admirers. Stiegler waited patiently, and when everybody had
had their say, he stuck out his hand. "Do you have a team?" he
asked. "How are you funding it?"
"We are funding it out of our hide," Nelson answered.
Stiegler thanked the inventor and walked away. "I knew something
like this was not going to be done by three guys in their spare time,"
he says.
In 1988, however, Stiegler's desire to meet Eric Drexler brought him
to the Xanadu office, and Phil Salin went to work explaining to the successful
executive that Xanadu represented the chance of a lifetime.
The match between Stiegler and Xanadu was doubly unlikely; not only
was Stiegler happily unemployed, but the Xanadu programmers did not seem
to place high value on management personnel. As Stiegler tells it, the
original plan during the first days at Autodesk was to get somebody with
a good résumé and stick him in a closet until somebody from
Autodesk came to visit, at which point the obedient manager could be trotted
out to prove that the hackers were under control. This was hardly Stiegler's
style.
"The place was pretty chaotic," Stiegler says, explaining
how strongly he was affected by the idealistic programmers' passionate
quest and obvious need for assistance. "But Xanadu had this amazing
effect - it was irresistible."
This irresistibility derives, first, last, and always, from the grand
Xanadu dream. Stiegler wasn't sure that Xanadu would work, but if it did,
the consequences would be magnificent. Gathered together in a nice, new
office in Palo Alto, with fully stocked refrigerators and comfortable furniture,
the Xanadu team prepared to build the ultimate hypertext system. For once,
they had tools, including as much computing power as their hearts desired.
Regular paychecks allowed them to be revolutionaries and pay their rent.
And even their executive manager accepted that their mission was to change
the world.
Of course, the new situation also had its confusing aspects. In 1988,
Xanadu was forced for the first time to operate as a commercial software
concern. Xanadu's regular Tuesday meetings were messy; Nelson would arrive
from his Sausalito office with his note cards and his tape recorder and
his video camera and wave his hands furiously in front of the white boards.
Although he did not control the development process, Nelson's energetic
lectures ensured that nothing in his grand design was forgotten. When Nelson
was not presenting, Miller and Gregory argued about the value of the work
completed during and since the Swarthmore summer, and the programmers played
their favorite game, in which any moment of aphasia or unsuccessful mental
search for the name of an author or book was followed by the traditional
exclamation, "If only we had Xanadu!"
Stiegler saw that he had his work cut out for him. "It was a complicated
time," he says today. Looking around the office, he attempted to divine
who could help the company move from volunteerism to profitability. Divisions
were already brewing: on one hand, the Xerox PARC alumni favored the new
programming language Smalltalk and found themselves often in agreement;
on the other, the old-style C hackers, like Johan Strandberg, McClary's
closest friend on the project, tended to be more skeptical, traditional,
and careful.
Then there was Roger Gregory. Stiegler describes his situation with
a parable. "Say you've got a volunteer organization," Stiegler
says, "and you have to go to the North Pole. And there's a guy who
is going east, but he's drifting north. This guy is a hero. He's going
mainly east, but he'll eventually get to the North Pole. He's a hero! But
in a company where you are paying salaries and where you will run out of
money eventually, the guy who is traveling east and drifting north is somebody
you have to fire."
C H A P T E R E L E V E N
- Roger Gregory had promised Walker that the project would be
finished in 18 months. The design was completed in the early '80s, and
the task now was to quickly embody this design in sufficiently bug-free
and elegant code.
Gregory believed that he had large amounts of the Xanadu code near completion.
Over the years, he and various contributors had built a prototype of a
Xanadu server, the central machine that stored the information and made
it available to users on remote client machines. During the first months
at Autodesk, this Xanadu server was the focus of most of the programmers'
attention, and Gregory got far enough to send an alpha version out to some
users to examine. They examined it. It was broken.
Perhaps the alpha version was fixable. But Miller felt the problem was
deeper than the old code. Even if the server worked, it might not work
well enough to rescue Xanadu's battered reputation. Nelson had been stumping
for his universal hypertext system for 25 years, and the computer industry
had already grown supremely comfortable with the notion that the product
was vaporware. The Autodesk acquisition inspired a new round of press coverage,
which raised the level of doubt another notch. Ten years after the Swarthmore
summer, Miller did not want to release a creaky and crippled version of
the software he had helped design.
The basic features of the Xanadu hypertext system planned at Autodesk
in 1989 were relatively unchanged from the ones discussed by the early
Xanadu programmers at Swarthmore in 1979. In fact, the design was still
similar in many respects to the sketches Ted Nelson made back in 1965.
Xanadu was to consist of easy-to-edit documents. Links would be available
both to and from any part of any document. Anybody could create a link,
even in a document they did not write. And parts of documents could be
quoted in other documents without copying. The idea of quoting without
copying was called transclusion, and it was the heart of Xanadu's most
innovative commercial feature - a royalty and copyright scheme. Whenever
an author wished to quote, he or she would use transclusion to "virtually
include" the passage in his or her own document.
Nelson was frequently frustrated by his failure to convince casual questioners
of the importance of his transclusion idea. Transclusion functions like
the "make alias" command familiar to Macintosh users. An alias
works as a fully functioning copy of a file or application, but it is really
just a pointer, or virtual copy. Click on the virtual copy, and the original
file or application begins to run.
The key to the Xanadu copyright and royalty scheme was that literal
copying was forbidden in the Xanadu system. When a user wanted to quote
a portion of document, that portion was transcluded. With transclusion,
no actual copy was made, and every quote was really a pointer to the original
document. Xanadu's transclusion feature ensured that the system would always
trace an individual work when it was being read or quoted, allowing authors
to charge a small fee
for every reading.
Transclusion was extremely challenging to the programmers, for it meant
that there could be no redundancy in the grand Xanadu library. Every text
could exist only as an original. Every user in the world would have to
have instant access to the same underlying collection of documents.
Miller noted that the current version of Xanadu handled transclusion
in an extremely clumsy fashion. It also lacked the ability to keep track
of different versions, did not scale well, had no multimedia capabilities,
no security features, and performed poorly. The years of work Gregory had
devoted to writing code seemed as much a burden as a resource. Miller wondered
if it wasn't time to wipe the slate clean and start again.
Soon after the Autodesk investment, the power to control Xanadu's development
began to slip from Gregory's grasp. His erratic behavior prevented him
from rallying support as Miller and Stiegler took charge. And, at least
at first, Gregory trusted Miller. The two had been working on Xanadu for
many years and had together invented the tumbler addressing system.
McClary, like Gregory, had less and less influence as the months passed.
To the programmers from Xerox PARC, his work appeared slow. McClary's years
of consulting at large Michigan auto companies had taught him the virtue
of silent forbearance, and when he became aware that his opinion hardly
counted, he retreated into ill-spirited silence. Soon after his arrival
in Palo Alto, McClary was shuffled into a small office he resentfully called
"the phone closet," which gave him a quiet seat from which to
observe the action.
By 1991, the split in the Xanadu programming team was growing. On one
side were the Xerox PARC computer scientists who were prepared to use the
latest, avant-garde programming tools to completely reprogram the hypertext
system. On the other were Gregory, McClary, Johan Strandberg, and a shifting
group of Xanadu hangers-on who skeptically sniped at what they saw as Miller's
pursuit of an ever-receding mirage of design perfection. Eventually, Stiegler
fired Strandberg. And Gregory only kept his job thanks to his history with
the project, his partial ownership of Xanadu Operating Company, and his
special relationship with John Walker.
Although Gregory stayed on, the Xerox PARC programmers won all the battles,
beginning with the most important one. Gregory's old Xanadu code was thrown
away. The programmer's face, seven years later, still goes slack with disappointment
when he thinks about it.
For 12 years of missed deadlines, Gregory had nurtured his complex,
nonworking, but possibly fixable technology. His code was the accumulation
of all Xanadu's relationships and struggles since the early '70s. Through
those years, he had been sustained by his belief that Xanadu was close,
very close, to success. "Stiegler and Miller screwed up the entire
thing," Gregory says. "I had something that was within six
months of shipping."
C H A P T E R T W E L V E
- After deciding to jettison the old code, which meant an implicit
agreement to ignore John Walker's 18-month deadline, Miller and the other
lead architects made a second key decision. They chose to program in Smalltalk.
To the programmers who had been at Xerox PARC, Smalltalk seemed perfectly
suited to the rapid transformations of their design. Smalltalk is a programming
language based on distinct modules of code that can be strung together
into a working program. Program prototypes could be hacked out in Smalltalk
in days.
Theoretically, a Smalltalk prototype could be handed to a programmer
like McClary, who could then rewrite it in C++. This became the Xanadu
strategy: prototype in Smalltalk, translate to C++. Frequently, by the
time McClary started work on the translation, the design had evolved into
a new shape.
Encouraged by the flexibility of Smalltalk, the Xanadu architects became
obsessed with developing the widest possible applications of hypertext
technology. A universal democratic library, they decided, was only the
beginning. Xanadu could also provide a tool for rational discussion and
decision making among very large groups. In the Xanadu docuverse, an assertion
could always be followed back to its original source. An idea would never
become detached from its author. Public discussion on important issues
would move forward logically, rather than merely swirling ineffectively
through eddies of rhetoric. In fact, any reader could, by creating and
following links, freeze the chaotic flow of knowledge and grasp the lines
of connection and influence. Although Nelson was up in Sausalito, Miller,
Tribble, Stiegler, and another Xerox
PARC alumnus named Ravi Pandya were replicating his wildest fantasies
about Xanadu's power to change the world.
In a paper titled "The Open Society and Its Media," Miller,
Tribble, Pandya, and Stiegler pointed out that with transclusion, links
to critical information would remain intact no matter how many times a
passage was quoted. No form of communication in history had ever offered
this possibility. In books, television, and radio, the truth is a slave
to a good story, and convincing lies are remembered while dry, factual
refutations are forgotten. In Xanadu, this problem is solved. Transclusion
and freedom
to link are crucial to social progress, the programmers argued, because
otherwise, the constant mutation of a discussion "would destroy selection
by leaving criticisms behind."
The echoes of evolutionary theory were intentional. During the weeks,
months, and then years of sophisticated redesign of Xanadu at Autodesk,
the architects began to believe they were helping human life evolve into
an entirely new form.
Under Autodesk, Miller had complete freedom to pursue his mathematical
solutions for data storage and retrieval, and he found enthusiastic companions
in Tribble and Pandya. But the problems they were solving were general
issues of hypertext design. They did not have a customer in mind, and they
gave little thought to the ways their hypertext system would be used. To
Gregory and McClary, the three scientists from Xerox appeared to be working
purely for the sake of mental pleasure.
The split between the programmers widened when, during one Tuesday meeting,
Miller held a ceremony to proclaim Tribble and Pandya "co-architects"
and handed them a baton to symbolize their new authority. McClary was embarrassed
and insulted. As the horizon of a release date continued to recede, the
atmosphere at the company's offices grew increasingly unpleasant. Tribble
and Miller rented two-thirds of a triplex, and, according to McClary, began
to hold meetings without the other programmers present.
McClary recalls numerous surreal incidents. Once, Miller called the
technical staff together and lectured at length about Xanadu's final shape.
It took McClary some time to absorb everything and come up with his questions,
but when he returned to Miller to explore the issues further, he discovered
that every single thing he had wondered about had been completely redesigned.
"It was not rapid prototyping - it was rabid prototyping,"
said one of McClary's friends who watched the project closely. "They
were just randomly hacking and coming up with these groovy algorithms."
While Tribble, Dean, and Miller continued to hack, Jonathan Shapiro,
one of the founders of HaL Computer Systems Inc., was hired to write documentation.
To get his bearings, he challenged the Xanadu architects to describe a
typical customer for their software. He found their answers vague. In Miller's
view, the Xanadu technology was so radical that predicting its future uses
was difficult. Writers, teachers, and scientists; movie directors, commodities
brokers, and sports fans - Xanadu promised to remake everything.
Shapiro also discovered that the group had been working together so
long it had developed a kind of private slang. It took months to comprehend
what the programmers were talking about. Most of them were book lovers
and trivia mongers who enjoyed developing a metaphor based on obscure sources
and extending it via even more unlikely combinations. For instance, the
object in the Xanadu system that resembled a file was called a bert,
after Bertrand Russell. With files called bert, there had to be something
called an ernie, and so in the Xanadu publishing system, an ernie
was the unit of information for which users would be billed. To understand
the details of Xanadu, Shapiro had to learn not only the names for things,
but also the history of how those names had come to be.
Ted Nelson also found the slow progress of Xanadu distressing, but his
mind was on other subjects. He had arrived in California extremely burnt
out and depressed, and on the advice of a former girlfriend, he signed
up for some sex-liberation seminars. At what was then called the Stan Dale
Sex Workshops (and has since been renamed The Human Awareness Institute),
Nelson received what he calls a Great Healing. He soon took all the workshops.
Nelson continued to develop his general philosophy, General Schematics.
One branch of General Schematics involved his Xanadu designs, but another
branch was what he called "The General Theory of Status, Territory,
and the Paradigm."
A visitor to Nelson during his years at Autodesk recalls an evening
when the inventor, wearing a velvet vest and a satin shirt, lectured about
social status and its relationship to an internal, biological status regulator,
called a biotstat. However, Nelson's book on the topic, Biostrategy
and the Polymind, which he considers the "foundation" for
the next generation's social sciences, was never published because he mislaid
the computer printout with his revisions.
Nelson remained proud of his ambivalent relationship with computers.
Right at the peak of the desktop-publishing frenzy, Nelson became obsessed
with non-computerized xerox machines, Post-it notes, and transparencies.
And yet, despite his scattered interests, Nelson continued to exercise
an influence over the Xanadu programmers. For instance, Nelson's theory
of language holds that every time a concept changes, the word to describe
must change as well. There ought not be any "slippage" of one
term into another. New idea, new word. Applied to the development process
at Xanadu, this rule meant a constant stream of fresh jargon; the system
was filled not just with berts and ernies, but also with "flocks,"
"shepherds," "abrahams," "dybbuks," and "crums."
Because the programmers found it difficult to strictly follow Nelson's
"one-word, one-idea" rule, some slippage did occur. Working at
Xanadu offered a constant flow of scholastic argument over throwing out
names, switching names, and substituting names.
John Walker, Xanadu's most powerful protector, later wrote that during
the Autodesk years, the Xanadu team had "hyper-warped into the techno-hubris
zone." Walker marveled at the programmers' apparent belief that they
could create "in its entirety, a system that can store all the information
in every form, present and future, for quadrillions of individuals over
billions of years." Rather than push their product into the marketplace
quickly, where it could compete, adapt, or die, the Xanadu programmers
intended to produce their revolution ab initio.
"When this process fails," wrote Walker in his collection
of documents from and about Autodesk, "and it always does, that doesn't
seem to weaken the belief in a design process which, in reality, is as
bogus as astrology. It's always a bad manager, problems with tools, etc.
- precisely the unpredictable factors which make a priori design impossible
in the first place."
Miller, of course, did not agree. He knew that Xanadu's delays were
frustrating. But he also saw that despite the carping by critics both inside
and outside the project, they were making significant progress toward a
real, revolutionary hypertext system. By the end of 1991, Miller felt that
the most difficult design problems had been solved. "The last year
was the scariest," Miller says, "because until you come up with
those last answers, you fear that this one little thing you left until
the end might blow up into a disaster. But none of them blew up! That was
the most fun of all."
Miller, having pushed through the skepticism of his colleagues, mastered
the manic design process, and parsed the peculiar vocabulary, recalls that
he was nearly prepared to show his work to the world when, in February
1992, Autodesk celebrated its 10th anniversary with an announcement of
a bad sales quarter and a catastrophic collapse of its stock.
The stock was first pounded when the company reported an unprecedented
drop in earnings for the fourth quarter of fiscal year 1991. Within a day,
the stock dropped from $52 to about $40. Autodesk quickly rallied, but
beneath the surface, chaos spread as managers desperately cut spending
and reduced investment. When Walker returned to Autodesk from his now-permanent
residence in Switzerland in January before the announcement, he found his
company "heading for a train wreck of Wagnerian proportions."
Bravely, he announced the bad news personally at a major shareholders meeting,
where he also outlined the company's plans for recovery. But the stock
still plummeted. From its high of more than $60 in 1991, Autodesk had dropped
to 23 1/2 by mid-February 1992.
Autodesk's pounding by Wall Street produced a number of computer-industry
legends, including the story of Walker's famous attack on his own company's
management. His managers were "genial, well-meaning, and for the most
part hard-working individuals," Walker had written, with merciless
condescension, before describing their passivity and incompetence.
The poor sales figures and Walker's undiplomatic attack, which circulated
widely outside Autodesk, spelled trouble for Xanadu. To industry analysts
with influence over the price of Autodesk shares, the crisis at Autodesk
looked like evidence of a battle between headstrong hackers who built the
company, such as Walker, and professional managers who arrived later. A
reorganization along more conservative lines was inevitable, and by April,
Autodesk had found a new person to take charge. Carol Bartz's task during
her first months on the job was to take a stern inventory of the company's
most promising projects. And four months after she became CEO of Autodesk,
Bartz announced that the company's investment in Xanadu was finished.
When Autodesk crashed, tales of Xanadu's eminent demise were greeted
by many in the computer industry with a smirk; after all, the whiz kids
had been hacking away for four years, spending piles of corporate cash,
and the system was still as vaporous as ever. But to Mark Miller, the timing
of the Autodesk crisis was extraordinarily cruel. Today, Miller insists
that the programmers at Xanadu had their hypertext system within a heartbeat
of completion. How long a heartbeat? "Six months," he
says, sincerely.
C H A P T E R T H I R T E E N
- Roger Gregory was crushed by the programmers' failure to fulfill
his promise to Walker that a working system would be available within 18
months. He had been overruled by Miller and the other more well-spoken
members of the design team when they wanted to trash the first Xanadu code,
he had been brushed aside by Stiegler, and he had been kept by his own
bad temper and depression from influencing Xanadu's development. Now, as
the Xanaduers contemplated a cashless future, Gregory had nowhere to go.
The other architects had promising research and industrial careers. Gregory
was left with a small home in Palo Alto and his unrequited love for the
hypertext future.
For Michael McClary, the end of the Autodesk investment was an opportunity
to cut himself loose. He returned to private consulting. Stiegler also
looked for an exit. He paused briefly to help AMIX, also dropped by Autodesk,
make a transition to independence, and then retired to a ranch in Arizona.
Xanadu had been the most frustrating professional experience he had ever
had. "Xanadu," he says now, "constantly defeated me."
But the three lead architects - Pandya, Tribble, and Miller - were not
quite ready to quit. They announced that they'd give up their larger dreams
of hypertext, at least temporarily, if the right backers could be found
to support a more modest product. Finding these backers became Jonathan
Shapiro's job.
Shapiro had a crucial advantage over Marc Stiegler and Xanadu's other
mentors and supervisors since 1965: he did not believe hypertext was going
to save the world. The aggressive posturing, grand dreams, and boastful
proclamations that typified Xanadu since Nelson first started offending
his professors were part of the project's childhood and adolescence. Now,
after a few hard knocks, Xanadu seemed ready to grow up. Shapiro quickly
began working with Miller and the other designers to accomplish what they
had always felt free to ignore - identifying the specific, present-day
commercial needs Xanadu could meet, for instance, and creating materials
to show potential backers.
In a race to prevent years of effort from disappearing into the trash
heap of unreleased Autodesk software, Stiegler fiercely lobbied Autodesk
for some transitional funding to keep Xanadu alive. Autodesk, after much
discussion, charitably gave the Xanadu team a small amount of cash. Meanwhile,
Shapiro tried to find buyers.
The programmers vacated their Palo Alto offices and moved into Dean
Tribble's home. After Autodesk announced divestiture, in August 1992, ownership
of Xanadu Operating Company reverted to the programmers and a few other
longtime Xanadu supporters. Roger Gregory and Ted Nelson now owned about
half the company.
Nelson was startled by this turn of events. Every time the inventor
had asked about Xanadu's progress at Autodesk, he had been told that the
system would be ready within six months. It was not until a Xanadu meeting
in the summer of 1992 that he first felt the cold shock of reality. "This
feeling came over me - my God, they are not going to do it," he says.
"I had believed them all this time."
Nelson watched the spin-out warily. When Marc Stiegler left Xanadu,
Jonathan Shapiro became CEO of the newly independent company. The new executive
concluded that the key to Xanadu was its potential as part of a publishing
and royalty system, and he reached out to a company that was attempting
to manage an enormous number of royalty and copyright contracts - Kinko's.
Xanadu's proprietary data structure offered the possibility of a unified
tracking system for all the college material Kinko's was printing. Using
the transition funding from Autodesk, along with a workable demonstration
of the system, Shapiro believed he could get Xanadu into a deal with Kinko's
or another publisher within 30 days.
But the Kinko's deal resembled the royalty-based publishing scheme to
which Ted Nelson, and not Xanadu Operating Company, had exclusive rights.
In the end, Jonathan Shapiro did not manage to sell Xanadu to Kinko's.
Instead, the Xanadu programmers staged one of the most bizarre shareholder
battles the bewildered executive had ever seen.
C H A P T E R F O U R T E E N
- Until 1987, Xanadu had been a cooperative venture, a brave band
of fellow crusaders whose credo was "share and share alike."
Some, like Michael McClary, recognized the instability of such arrangements,
and shied away from participating until stock could be granted and salaries
paid. But The Silver Agreement in 1988 created two Xanadus. Nelson's Xanadu
was his imaginary system of information franchises. The Silver Agreement
gave Nelson exclusive right to any royalty-based publishing business. Meanwhile,
Xanadu Operating Company retained ownership of software being developed
by Roger Gregory and others. The Silver Agreement required Xanadu Operating
Company to give Nelson the Xanadu software for use in his Xanadu franchises,
while allowing the company to control the development of the software and
to use it in any other commercial venture.
Nelson's success was dependent on Xanadu Operating Company's success
- there could be no franchises without the underlying technology. And Nelson
remained a large shareholder in the company. But so far, Nelson's franchises
had been an illusory business based upon a nonexistent technology, a dream
built on a dream.
Now that the fantasy threatened to become real, certain aspects of The
Silver Agreement seemed vague. What, after all, was publishing? If Kinko's
were to track its copying business with Xanadu technology to meet agreements
with the owners of the copyrights, was this not perilously close to the
royalty-based publishing business exclusively reserved for Nelson? And
Xanadu Operating Company had another problem. Most of the programmers owned
only a negligible amount of stock. Now that Autodesk had cast them out,
they were facing a period of hard work for little pay. Shapiro wanted to
spread the ownership of the company a little deeper. Nelson, however, did
not feel like sharing his stock.
Just as the negotiations with Kinko's were getting under way, Nelson,
whose lifelong dream was about to take its first step toward genuine, if
diminished, realization, attempted to take over the company. The programmers,
who had seen Nelson's management style firsthand during the early '80s,
resisted.
"There wasn't anything to fight over," Shapiro says. "If
we did not complete the technology and sell it, everybody would die. But
Ted was determined to control it. The more determined Ted got to control
it, the more determined the programmers got not to be under his thumb."
Nelson blamed Miller, Stiegler, and Shapiro for Xanadu's long delays.
He had resigned himself to losing control of the software development process
at the time of the Autodesk investment, but he had consoled himself with
the thought that the professionals were qualified to complete their task.
Now that these professionals had failed decisively, Nelson wanted his company
back.
The programmers declined to work for Nelson. Miller and Shapiro were
confident they could retain control of Xanadu, since Nelson possessed neither
the skill to finish the code himself, nor the money to hire new programmers.
But they were facing a master strategist who understood the power of escalation.
Nelson soon found a way to provoke the desired crisis. "I nominated
Roger Gregory to the board of directors," recounts Nelson triumphantly.
The two owned nearly half the company, and together they could thwart nearly
any plan. "The reaction," Nelson says, "was as if I had
set fire to the curtains."
The final battle for control over the remains of Xanadu was not nice.
After Stiegler's resignation, Shapiro had come to represent, to Nelson,
the narrow-minded managers and punishing authority figures the inventor
despised. To Nelson, Shapiro was "an asshole." To Shapiro, Nelson
was "an arrogant bastard." Nelson claims not to remember the
details of the conflict, but according to Shapiro, the end came at a board
meeting in the end of 1992, when Nelson said frankly that he was not going
to cooperate with the plans of any company that had Shapiro in control.
Shapiro countered that if Nelson would give more ownership of the company
to the programmers, he would agree to resign as chief executive officer.
Nelson accepted the deal, the shares were re-distributed, and Shapiro departed.
For the programmers, it was a Pyrrhic victory. By the time the battle
was over, Kinko's senior management had stopped returning phone calls,
most of Autodesk's transitional funding had been spent on lawyers fees,
and the Xanadu team had managed to acquire ownership of a company that
had no value.
Xanadu, so many times dead, was dead again.
C H A P T E R F I F T E E N
- While Xanadu was dying, Charlie Smith was starting a company.
It was called Memex, and its first product would be a record-keeping system
for insurance companies. Smith examined the remains of Xanadu, which, though
it had no money, no working code, and no prospects, did possess
some groovy data-storage and retrieval algorithms Smith thought he might
use in his soon-to-be built software.
What Smith offered was a half-success - barely. Under Memex, the code
would be torn from its integrated global information network. Xanadu, heir
to so many hopes, would become an organ donor, its powerful algorithmic
heart beating in the center of an insurance-industry database.
Smith had little money. But the wrangling over the dying Xanadu had
sapped the participants of their possessiveness. When Memex offered to
license the technology and hire some of the employees to complete it, Miller,
Tribble, and Pandya, along with fellow programmers Christopher Hibbert,
Eric Hill, and Rob Jellinghaus, signed on. Gregory, while remaining a large
shareholder of Xanadu Operating Company, did not go to work at Memex. Jonathan
Shapiro was replaced as Xanadu executive manager by a newcomer, Ann Hardy.
From their headquarters in Dean Tribble's house, the surviving Xanadu programmers
moved back to California Avenue in Palo Alto, where Memex had its offices.
The quarters were familiar. It was the same building that had housed Xanadu
during the years it was supported by Autodesk.
The youngest member of the Xanadu programming team, Rob Jellinghaus
had been with Xanadu for about two years when Autodesk cut off its support.
He was a lean, inexperienced 23-year-old, yet he seemed more worldly than
Xanadu programmers twice his age. In 1992, hackerdom was no longer a despised
subculture. Friendly, articulate, and respectful, Jellinghaus could have
been an apprentice member of any professional guild - a graphic designer,
a screenwriter, a young architect. He had not yet been born when the first
Xanadu designs were made, and he had received his inspiration firsthand,
from primitive hypertext software, CD-ROMs and the Internet. The presence
of Jellinghaus at Xanadu was a sign that Nelson's 1965 invention was becoming
common property.
Jellinghaus's office was up in Sausalito, with the more mainstream Autodesk
projects. He hadn't been close enough to Xanadu to witness the project's
last phase of self-destruction, and he was young enough to accept the financial
risk. So, after Memex licensed Xanadu, Jellinghaus and Dean Tribble tackled
a long-delayed task - writing a "front end" for the system.
This need was urgent: the front end, or user interface, would show potential
investors and customers what a redesigned Xanadu system could do in the
service of a specific commercial task. The lack of a front end had been
a perennial problem. The Xanadu philosophy had always held that if a perfect
back end could be created, the front end would take care of itself. While
the Xanaduers paid lip service to libertarian ideals, they imagined a more
traditional revolution in which all users would be linked to a single,
large, utopian system. But in their quest for a 21st-century model, they
created a Byzantine maze.
"There were links, you could do versions, you could compare versions,
all that was true," Jellinghaus reports, "provided you were a
rocket scientist. I mean, just the code to get a piece of text out of the
Xanadu back end was something like 20 lines of very, very hairy C++, and
it was not easy to use in any sense of the word. Not only was it not easy
to use, it wasn't anything even remotely resembling fast. The more I worked
at it, the more pessimistic I got."
The young programmer's doubts were magnified by his dawning realization
that a grand, centralized system was no longer the solution to anything.
He had grown up with the Internet - a redundant, ever-multiplying and increasingly
chaotic mass of documents. He had observed that users wanted and needed
ever more clever interfaces to deal with the wealth of information, but
they showed little inclination to obey the dictates of a single company.
"The front end is the most important thing," Jellinghaus
slowly understood. "If you don't have a good front end, it doesn't
matter how good the back end is. Moreover, if you do have a good front
end, it doesn't matter how bad the back end is."
Although he sympathized with the fanaticism of his colleagues, Jellinghaus
also began to question whether a hypertext revolution required the perfect
preservation of all knowledge. He saw the beauty of the Xanadu dream -
"How do you codify all the information in the world in a way that
is infinitely scalable?" - but he suspected that human society might
not benefit from a perfect technological memory. Thinking is based
on selection and weeding out; remembering everything is strangely similar
to forgetting everything. "Maybe most things that people do shouldn't
be remembered," Jellinghaus says. "Maybe forgetting is good."
Such heretical doubts did not have time to ripen, because after six
months of work at Memex, the full fees owed to the Xanadu Operating Company
for licensing the company's equipment had not been paid. The programmers
had expected that Smith would need some time to complete the first phase
of funding for his company, but a cash crisis at Memex meant he couldn't
come through with his payments. Although Jellinghaus had the fewest financial
commitments, he was also the least fanatical, and he had left a good job
behind at Autodesk. After a couple of months, he began to come to his senses.
"What was I doing?" he remembers saying to himself. "This
is silly. This was silly all along."
Mark Miller, who continued to invest more of his time in the project,
found it harder to leave Xanadu behind. He had invested so many years in
the project; even if Memex didn't pay the bills, he could not just turn
his back and walk away. One evening at the end of November 1994, a group
of the programmers, with the approval of Miller and Ann Hardy, went to
the Memex office and pulled the plug. They carried the machines out with
them, leaving a bare space.
Roger Gregory, of course, did not participate. He was only a Xanadu
shareholder, not a Memex employee, and his contact with the programmers
was limited. But his response to the abduction of Xanadu machinery was
wonderfully consistent with his outlook on life. "I just don't understand,"
he says. "I don't have any sympathy for them. It is beyond my comprehension
for somebody to quit just because they have not been paid for six
months."
With the computers gone, Xanadu was more than dead. It was dead and
dismembered. Visitors to California Street would have seen hardly a trace.
In the end, Xanadu was like a defeated rebel whose corpse is destroyed
in secret so as not to become a shrine.
C H A P T E R S I X T E E N
- One rainy day last fall, I met Mark Miller in a deserted Thai
restaurant near the old Xanadu offices. We sat together for several hours,
listening to the faint repetitive rumbling of a bowling alley next door.
Miller reiterated that when he absconded with the computers from Memex,
he did not feel that he was committing a theft, since Memex was using them
under an agreement with Xanadu Operating Company, whose fees for the equipment
had never been fully paid.
I told Miller I understood, and we fell to talking about the World Wide
Web. During the years Xanadu was at Autodesk, the graph that measures Internet
growth began to go asymptotic. While Miller, Gregory, and the other coders
were agonizing over their broken system, the Internet was offering a simple
prototype of a universal library. Unlike the carefully guarded Xanadu code,
the programming tools on which the Internet depended were open to all,
and tens of thousands of users tinkered with them. In Geneva, Tim Berners-Lee,
completely ignorant of the Xanadu propaganda, wrote a simple standard for
hypertext publishing, which he named the World Wide Web. In Urbana-Champaign,
Illinois, Marc Andreessen wrote an attractive front end for the Web, which
he called Mosaic. Powered by anarchy and a passion for self-improvement,
the Internet lurched toward hypertext.
I asked Miller if the Internet was accomplishing his dreams for hypertext.
"What the Web is doing is easy," Miller answered. He pointed
out that the Web still lacks nearly every one of the advanced features
he and his colleagues were trying to realize. There is no transclusion.
There is no way to create links inside other writers' documents. There
is no way to follow all the references to a specific document. Most importantly,
the World Wide Web is no friend to logic. Rather, it permits infinite redundancy
and encourages maximum confusion. With Xanadu - that is, with tranclusion
and freedom to link - users would have had a consistent, easily navigable
forum for universal debate.
"This is really hard," Miller said. "We made lots
of progress. It was really good progress, and if the money had come through
in time for the core team to have stayed with it, I have no doubts that
we would have built a really amazing system that would have done all the
things that had been promised in Xanadu's name."
Still, Miller conceded that the Web's existence means that it must be
accepted as the basis for a better form of hypertext. "We've got to
use all of our technical insights to migrate the Web to a higher plane,"
he said. Miller is pondering how to allow readers to add links to other
writers' Web pages without copying the original documents. In his view,
this would be a simple step in the right direction. "It would be a
little bit kludgy, but you could do it," Miller said. "It wouldn't
take millions of dollars. I estimate something like a three- to six-man,
monthlong effort." I instinctively factored this prediction in my
head, because I recognized the code in which the Xanadu programmers speak
of the future: six months.
After my talk with Miller, I called Ted Nelson in Sapporo, Japan. By
the time Autodesk withdrew its commitment to hypertext, Nelson had more
or less run out of listeners in his homeland. The long misery of Xanadu
had put him in a difficult position both financially and intellectually;
among the new generation of computer hackers, the inventor was publicly
tolerated and privately pitied. But in Japan, Nelson reported, he has finally
found proper appreciation. "They've done their homework," he
said. "They understand and they listen. They care about the ideas."
Nelson added that he finds the Japanese much easier to communicate with
than Americans. "It's a matter of being totally upfront," he
theorized. "Everybody is very straightforward."
In Japan, Nelson has been lobbying for a system of transclusion that
does not depend on the Xanadu software. He has baptized this system "transcopyright."
Transcopyright is not a technology; it is Nelson's suggestion for a contractual
solution to copyright problems. Nelson argues that electronic publishers
should allow anybody to republish their materials, provided that republication
takes place by means of a pointer to the original document or fragment.
Just as in Nelson's imaginary Xanadu franchises, publishers of transcopyrighted
documents would receive a payment every time one of their bytes was accessed.
In his description of transcopyright, the inventor admits that "certain
unusual software features are required" to implement his system, including
a back end that can bill users for small amounts of materials, and a front
end capable of automatically editing and presenting documents that may
have been purchased from several sources. In fact, transcopying is similar
to Xanadu, but without the machinery. Nelson has reduced his contribution
to a name and a description. But for Nelson, names and descriptions have
always been the heart of the matter. On the short paper that presents his
transcopyright idea, Nelson identifies himself as "Founder of Interactive
Media," and "Founder of Network Publishing."
Nelson, who recently moved to Japan, sleeps in the afternoon and works
all night, so I called him at 5 a.m. Sapporo time. Along with lobbying
for transcopyright, Nelson is working with Professor Yuzuru Tanaka, a computer
scientist who is developing a simple programming language. With Tanaka,
Nelson is attempting to implement the earliest hypertext design, his 1965
proposal for a personal writing system that allows screen editing with
transclusion and links.
Nelson's response to the Web was "nice try." He said it is
a trivial simplification of his hypertext ideas, though cleverly implemented.
And he has not entirely given up hope for the old Xanadu code. "I'd
like to stress that everyone involved in Xanadu believes that the software
is valid and can be finished," he asserted.
"It will be finished," Nelson added. "The only
question is which decade."
C H A P T E R S E V E N T E E N
- Roger Gregory, along with fellow hacker Keith Henson, has frozen
numerous people. Both Henson and Gregory hope that each of these frozen
people will be resurrected sometime in the future, when medical science
has produced a cure for their ailments.
At the beginning of 1994, Henson ran into Memex founder Charlie Smith,
whom he had known for some time, at a New Year's Eve party. Henson asked
his old acquaintance how things were going, and Smith answered that things
were going poorly. He arrived at his office on November 30 to demonstrate
Memex to a prospective funder only to find that all his machines were gone.
His fledgling business, desperately in need of outside investment, seemed
to have walked out in the middle of the night.
Henson, a Xanadu investor, guessed out loud that neither Gregory nor
Nelson knew the machines had been taken. He was right. He contacted them
both, and eventually helped move the whole project in a new direction.
After Smith made clear that a lawsuit would be the likely result if they
failed to return the machines, Miller and his colleagues finally abandoned
their code, their computers, and their hopes for Xanadu's eventual release.
They returned the machines to Memex. And after the remnants of the Autodesk
team scattered, Charlie Smith hired Roger Gregory to finish the Xanadu
software, which ran to 300,000 lines of code.
Last fall, I visited Gregory in Palo Alto. His flawed directions to
his home brought me to a dead end against the lawn of a Palo Alto research
park. The lawn was perfectly trimmed, and it seemed to express the efficiency
with which the unruly inspirations of myriad scientists are disciplined
by corporate enterprise and turned into profit.
Roger Gregory, by all accounts, is incapable of such discipline. This
was lucky for me, because it made his house conspicuous. At the end of
the street, one front yard was decorated with at least a dozen disassembled
bicycles. Peeking through a flimsy curtain of plywood were three decades
of computer machinery: platters, disk drives, metal casings, fans, and
layers of motherboards whose antique architectures looked as if they contained,
in some quaint, unreadable form, an entire history of the digital era.
Gregory answered the door when I knocked. His dirty blue pants were
unbuttoned and he was barefoot. A long-sleeve pinkish T-shirt dropped over
his rounded midsection but stopped before it reached his pants.
From the outside, Gregory's house looked like it was spilling its guts.
Inside, the perspective was reversed. The back room looked out through
a glass door onto a patio, where more disassembled bicycles were intertwined.
Computers cluttered the entrance way, and rows of tattered books crowded
the walls from floor to ceiling.
With hundreds of other pieces of stuff - children's toys, random
tools, racks of hardware, and tangles of wire - trailing across every surface,
across the floor, and continuing out in the back yard, Gregory's home seemed
as if it had volunteered itself to the world as a sanctuary for discarded
but possibly useful objects. A television mounted above Gregory's computer
was tuned to a shopping channel.
We spoke for some time about Xanadu. Gregory railed with unrestrained
bitterness against the programmers and managers who controlled his project
over the years. "Is Marc Stiegler still alive?" he marveled.
"That's too bad." Gregory described trying to build Xanadu under
the old management as being like "repairing a watch on top of a tree
house in a gale. The gale was the wind of constant redesign and change."
Quietly, while Gregory recited his complaints, I scanned the programmer's
walls. His bookshelves were overwhelming. So much anxiety was collected
there: dust-covered and unread books, books piled behind other books, redundant
editions and bookstore rejects; along with 20,000 other volumes, Gregory
owns five complete sets of the Encyclopedia Britannica. Over his
bed were the elegant codices of the Britannica's Eleventh Edition,
famous for its learned essays on every topic.
I stared hard at Gregory's books. A hundred years ago, with only the
products of the printing press to aid them, the Britannica encyclopedists
built a collection of information that, while incomplete, convincingly
pointed the way toward total knowledge. Today, with the advent of far more
powerful memory devices, Xanadu, the grandest encyclopedic project of our
era, seemed not only a failure but an actual symptom of madness. In Gregory's
house, this contradiction was evident: the arch-hacker had built himself
a barricade of books, a paper dike against a flood of sorrow.
The very first story Ted Nelson told me was based on a vision of water
disturbed. To Nelson, the swirling currents under his grandfather's boat
represented the chaotic transformation of all relationships and the irrecoverable
decay associated with the flow of time. His Xanadu project was meant to
organize this chaos, to channel this flow. Sitting with Roger Gregory,
surrounded by yellowing walls of literary authority, I remembered that
Xanadu's programmers never solved the basic problem of computer performance.
No matter how powerful their machines, or how elegant their code, there
had always been too much data to move in and out of memory.
During the same month I interviewed Gregory at home, I also went to
see him at his work. On the door of his office at Memex was a sign that
said: "S.T. Coleridge and Sons. Danger." The rooms inside were
small, hardly bigger than booths at a trade fair. On a white board, in
orange pen, was the admonition: "This is commerce, this is not your
hobby." A corner of the room contained a giant bag of lemons and a
sleeping bag.
I had come for an interview in the late morning, but Gregory had not
yet appeared. Keith Henson, wearing Birkenstocks, blue jeans, a black shirt,
and a black tie, welcomed me in. At about noon, Gregory arrived. The loud
hum of the machines inside his small office proved too much for my meager
tape recorder, forcing us out into the parking lot. We sat an hour between
rain storms in the front seat of Henson's automobile. The low, dark roof
of the car made it feel like a coffin. Gregory's T-shirt was covered with
fine, reddish dust - a trace, I guessed, of a losing battle with his electric
razor. Gregory admitted being groggy - he stayed up late the night before
wrestling with the remains of Xanadu.
The hacker's voice was very quiet. He was holding his head in his hands,
and for much of the hour, he spoke without shifting position. His tall,
soft body was curled, his knees were bent to his chest, and his heels were
planted on the edge of the driver's seat. Gregory's upper cheeks and forehead
rested against his palms, as if in a slow-motion demo of The Scream.
We scrolled back through every phase of the project, reviewing Xanadu's
cheerful beginnings in Ann Arbor, its half-dozen deaths, the euphoria of
the Autodesk investment, the heartbreak of the spin-out, the bitter personal
battle for control of the company, and the present-day pathos of Gregory's
single-handed attempt to salvage, somehow, the endless, incomprehensible,
lines of code.
Without protest, without calculation, Gregory answered every question.
"I don't know," he said, in answer to a query that is inaudible
on my tape and that I can't remember. "I've struggled."
A few times, Gregory paused and took several deep breaths, but he always
resumed, determined to make his point. He talked with the air of a person
who despairs of justice in this lifetime but counts on the vindication
of history.
Finally, we made it to the end of the tale. There was only one remaining
question, and it seemed both obvious and cruel. His project had promised
an end to forgetting, but in the end, only Gregory had been unable to forget.
The deluge of information had arrived. The other programmers had drifted
away. Only Gregory remained with his fingers on the broken Xanadu machine.
"Why?" I asked.
"Total insanity," Gregory answered, both hands squeezing his
face.
Gary Wolf (gary@wired.com) is
the executive editor of HotWired. He and Michael Stein are the authors
of Aether Madness: An Off-Beat Guide to the Online World (Peachpit
Press '95).
All rights reserved.