Developer Releases Most Delayed Software Project Xanadu After 54 Years

The very first hypertext project, Xanadu by Ted Nelson from 1960, has ‘finally’ been released after 54 years. This makes Xanadu the most delayed software project ever. “We screwed up in the 1980s.”

Nelson, now 76, started Project Xanadu in 1960 as a Harvard student. The original idea was to write a word processor that could reference other versions from within a document. This all happened in one overview, so that the differences were quickly visible. This would be particularly useful for seeing exactly where references come from, making Xanadu one universal library.

Project Xanadu was initially seen as the foundation of the future internet and gained the attention of talented programmers in the last century, but inventor Tim Berners-Lee eventually beat Nelson with his world wide web. Partly due to a lack of money and too ambitious plans, Nelson was unable to complete Xanadu.

“We screwed up in the 1980s and missed the opportunity to become a global hypertext. But we can still compete with PDF, which simulates paper, by showing cross-text references,” Nelson told The Guardian.

The software project has only been quietly rolled out on the Internet and has been named OpenXanadu. The program displays a simple document based on quotes from eight other works, including the King James Version and the Wikipedia page on steady-state theory. OpenXanadu shows from which parts of the works the references come.

The software has ‘not yet’ been released as open source, which Nelson suggests that this could happen. In the meantime, he is ambitiously working on the project, he says on his site. He still expects Xanadu to be able to send the source files in the future. “That’s the next stage.”