[cap-talk] mitsu at temboo.com

[James A. Donald]

Mitsu Hadeishi wrote:
 > I personally think a thrash about Xanadu is hardly
 > likely to produce anything of benefit here, and I
 > would encourage both sides to focus on capability
 > security rather than rehashing debates about Xanadu.

Quite so, so am replying off list.

Xanadu was imagined in excessive and inordinate detail
in some respects, vastly overspecified, and in other
respects was never imagined in sufficient detail to even
start on preparing a presentation, let alone a
prototype, let alone start on coding.

This was apparent in 1988, and was commented on in 1988,
and in the succeeding years, nothing changed.

For example, Xanadu, as imagined, did not deliver
content - it delivered  eight bit binary data.   No one
ever thought about the client interface or the authoring
process in sufficient detail to specify something like
html, or something like pdf, or something like flash.

After near thirty years of work, Xanadu, and its
successor udanax, is not only nowhere near finished, it
is not yet even begun.  This was obvious at the time, and
remains obvious.  Anyone who failed to see it deserves
ridicule.  It was just a crack fantasy, with gaping
holes that no one even thought about filling in.