Review: Project Xanadu – The Internet That Might Have Been
6 comments
·September 21, 2025AfterHIA
Massive Nelson fan here. My question right now is knowing that Ted's moved from, "the alt Internet" to a, "really bitchin' writing tool" what's the current state of development? What's Christina Engelbart up to?
If the right people just starting designing software again we could accomplish so much. SV is essentially dead in terms of meaningful innovation. All it would take is developing a better operating system, a better web browser, a better personal computer. The competition has lowered the bar so low. Certainly something could be done. #as #we #may #continue #to #think
mystraline
Ive seen this abomination batted around every so often as 'the internet that could have been'. Glad it wasn't.
Some of my own critiques.
1. Nelson wanted to institute optional micropayments, like 1 cent or fractions of cents to pay to access content. This would mean that nearly everything would have a paywall.
2. With automated paywalls (to charge and to pay), would lead to scammed content like a infinite scrolling page at 1 cent a page, to not get immediately blocked.
3. The idea was that you could also charge for your content. What would happen is your stuff would get scraped, added to aggregators, and charged more while you get nothing.
4. You pay for seemingly legit content and pay for scams. No way to charge back.
5. With all this micropayments and stuff, would necessitate DRM on all 'pay' content. It would be the only way to stop downloading/archiving/reuploading with micropayments that go to me. I view DRM on everything as a computing hellscape.
6. Nelson's extreme secrecy was what caused his system to never get any traction. Those Mosaic and A-Pachy folks were like 'set up a fresbsd box and make a free website.' None of this goofy money crap.
cleartext412
The scraping and reuploading issue could be solved by some kind of universal global content identification system, integrated into the micropayments system, making sure no matter where certain piece of content is uploaded, the fee would still go to the copyright owner, perhaps with some small percent given to the hosting website. Not saying it would certainly work, but there is a few technologies probably everyone here have heard about that seems like a very good fit for the task.
HexDecOctBin
> This would mean that nearly everything would have a paywall.
Now everything has ads and is SEOed to hell. And everyone used Ad Blockers, so the authors still get nothing.
mystraline
Ive seen freemium services now, that used to be 'free but ad infested', and 'pay but no ads' - go to 'pay but you still get ads'.
I have no reason to think otherwise if Xanadu did the micropayments scam AND ads. And I would expect some online script would necessitate downloading and paying for ads to decrypt the content to enforce paying to get advertised at.
Ted Nelson had really good ideas, but he stood in his own way.
He wanted to build a closed-source system that he owned and controlled. He was a bad project leader and got nowhere. His patents prevented others from using zigzag structures. Decades later, when some people wanted to build an open-source GZigZag, he first said it was okay to use the name, then turned sour on it and prevented them from using it.
If someone wants to do it again, they shouldn't involve Ted Nelson in any way our use anything he has control over, whether a trademark or a patent.
The Curse of Xanadu https://www.wired.com/1995/06/xanadu/