I came out of this article with a new respect for John Walker of Autodesk. Here's his take on the collision of architecture astronauts and waterfall project planning:<p>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.<p>"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."<p><a href="http://www.fourmilab.ch/autofile/www/chapter2_108.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.fourmilab.ch/autofile/www/chapter2_108.html</a> continues with:<p>Absolutely the only way I know to succeed with an innovative product is to throw something together quickly, push it out the door, persuade some lunatic early-adopters to start using it, and then rapidly evolve it on a quick turnaround cycle based on market acceptance and driven by a wish list from actual users.
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.<p>I'll drink to that.
I worked with Roger Gregory for a few weeks in 1999, 4 years after this article was written. He still hadn't recovered from Xanadu. I got the impression that he never really would.
I've worked with Ted and it's a myth that he makes vapour ware. For instance, Gzz is a fully-working program.<p>Also, I have a 1989 article from Language Technology (Louis Rossetto's first magazine before Wired), and it's a breezy interview with Ted about Zigzag, and other issues, with no malice. I have no idea why Louis turned on Ted later in Wired (this very article). I might post the LT article.
This article is great and I hope to see many more like it on hacker news. I know most people hate the goldfish tendency of most social networks to go through "forgotten" articles, but stuff like this needs to be brought up. Long and interesting articles make this site so much more livable :P.
Why do projects name Xanadu always seems to mean some boondoggle?<p>Xanadu is a name of a mall in Jersey that was supposed to open in 2007 but got pushed back next summer. Even then, it might not even survive the recession.<p>I guess the lesson is never call your projects Xanadu or Duke Nukem Forever.