It was clear that the WWW was a good idea but it clearly wouldn’t succeed because of the foolish decision not to have back links. But it might gain a bit of traction and make people receptive for the real thing. I attended more than one significant academic conference in the early 90s where this belief was uttered to general agreement. People had even already experienced broken links and yet couldn’t put 2 and 2 together.<p>I also wanted bidirectional links even though I was a Lisp programmer! In case it’s not clear, one way links was an inspired decision.<p>Another belief, in the latter part of the 90s, was that decent web search was basically impossible as someone would have to store a copy of the whole thing, which is clearly impossible.
There is an amazing indy video game called "Kentucky Route Zero" which is an adventure esque game where you explore a mysterious magical road in Kentucky and meet all sorts of fantastical people and creatures. It is bizarre and the genre is probably best described as magical surrealism.<p>Anyway <i>Spoilers</i> when going through one of the caves, you meat these bizarre computer science researchers who have an old mainframe named Xanadu. It's all a reference to the actual project that shot for the moon and just kinda got left behind. Interesting historical tidbits shoved in the game.
Ah Xanadu! I always think of the 1995 "The Curse of Xanadu" in wired[1], both because it's good and because it's from an age when the idea of universal connection felt much further away.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.wired.com/1995/06/xanadu/" rel="nofollow">https://www.wired.com/1995/06/xanadu/</a>
Ted Nelson, in his own words, in a video by Notion: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JN1IBkAcJ1E" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JN1IBkAcJ1E</a>
Transclusion is a great concept which I first time saw and used in Jacobson's Objectory software engineering tool. It's also available in the CrossLine information manager (see <a href="https://github.com/rochus-keller/CrossLine" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/rochus-keller/CrossLine</a>).
In 1988, Autodesk (makers of AutoCAD) was so impressed by the Xanadu project that they gave them financial backing. After four years, Autodesk gave up:<p>> […] <i>Come 1992, the “resources of Autodesk” were still funding “talent of the Xanadu team” which had not, as of that date, produced anything remotely like a production prototype—in fact, nothing as impressive as the 88.1x prototype which existed before Autodesk invested in Xanadu. On August 21, 1992 Autodesk decided to pull the plug and give its interest in Xanadu back to the Xanadudes.</i><p>(Quoted from footnote linked from this page: <a href="https://www.fourmilab.ch/autofile/e5/chapter2_64.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.fourmilab.ch/autofile/e5/chapter2_64.html</a>)
I completely reject Project Xanadu, for one primary reason: it turns an open web into a per-page paywall DRM horror. And where money comes, user tracking and anti-privacy tech follows.<p>Right now, it takes time and effort to paywall stuff. It's not super hard, but is not a seamless flip-a-switch-on paywall.<p>With Xanadu, that paywall is built in at the core - request a page, pay the cost, get the page and hope its what you want. And I can only imagine the level of scrape-scams at that level - spam would be not only viable but make money per click.<p>Sure, I could imagine useful tools to prevent hemorrhaging money, but the threat of clicking links and owing 1-10$ for that is horrifying.<p>Hard pass. It does deserve a study in its technology and closed-sourceness when it was devised. But it needs to stay in the scrap-bin of history.
I did not see this article directly linked in the comments:
<a href="https://www.wired.com/1995/06/xanadu/" rel="nofollow">https://www.wired.com/1995/06/xanadu/</a>