🚀 go-pugleaf

>> For the benefit of many of us who have not heard of the Xanadu
>> project, could you please elaborate about what this whole effort is
>> about?  Thanks.
 
>> Ross Erickson

Xanadu is working on a hypermedia database server.  It will support
what we are calling open, social hypermedia.  The database will
support text, bitmaps, sound, video, and animation as well as links
between them all at whatever granularity is desired: from a character
or pixel to a whole library.  Some of the implications of supporting
open, social hypertext are that:

+ multiple users can simultaneously edit documents, 
+ links continue to connect to the same things even as the documents
    at the ends of the link evolve,
+ you can install detectors on documents that will notify you when the
    documents are modified or linked-to, and
+ we support links to information that is stored outside the Xanadu
    repository.  (WAIS and WWW provide this kind of ability)

The project has a long and colorful history, starting with Ted Nelson
coining the terms "hypertext" and "hypermedia" in 1965 or so.  You can
read his recently reissued book, "Computer Lib/Dream Machines" to find
out about his original conception for the global hypertext publishing
system.  (It's available from Microsoft Press.)  What we're actually
building at this point is only a part of Ted's original conception,
though it's designed to be the first stepping stone to the whole
thing.

We're building a hypermedia storage server; the database engine.  It
will require a separate FrontEnd, or User Interface, in order to be
useful.  We'll provide one such FrontEnd, but we really want other
developers to build a variety of application-specific FrontEnds to
exploit our work in many different fields.  We hope to see Xanadu
applications in CASE, CAD, CAE, Medical data storage, legal office,
Group work, image retrieval and manipulation, and many other fields.

The project has been around for quite a while, and has reported being
nearly done many times. :-)  In order to save some face and not
disappoint more people than we already have, I'm not going to make any
predictions about when we'll ship.  We are planning a limited early
non-commercial developer release in a month or two.  If you're
interested in participating, please let me know and I'll send you an
application.  We'll also accept applications from commercial sites,
though we won't release to them until we get satisfactory results from
earlier rounds.


Chris Hibbert
Manager of Software Development
-- 
hibbert@xanadu.com                      AMIX:    CHibbert
uunet!xanadu!hibbert                    MCIMail: CHibbert