Compiled from: Wired magazine's June 1995 article: The Curse of Xanadu, by Gary Wolf.
This is the most radical computer dream of the hacker era. Ted Nelson's “Xanadu project” is considered a universal, democratic hypertext library that would help humanity evolve into a new form of life. Instead, it captivated Nelson and his brave, fearless followers, leading them into what would become the longest-running vaporware project in computer history—a mad prototype design and a heartbreaking, desperate legend spanning 30 years. An astonishing epic tragedy.
Chapter One#
As hypertext master and design genius Ted Nelson made a left turn through the rude traffic on Marin Avenue in Sausalito, I said a brief prayer. Nelson's left hand rested on the steering wheel, while his right hand casually rested on the back of the front seat. He craned his neck to look at me so I could hear him clearly. “I've been organizing a catalog of driving maneuvers,” he said. “It's one of my unfinished projects.”
Nelson is a pale, angular, energetic man, dressed in clothes with many pockets. In these pockets, he carries an astonishing number of items. Anything that won't fit in his pockets is strapped to his belt. For him, carrying a tape recorder and tapes, a camera and tapes, red pens, black pens, silver pens, a bulging wallet, a leather bag with a spiral notebook, a huge keychain on a long retractable chain, a Swiss Army knife, notepads, various old receipts, a set of disposable chopsticks, some soy sauce, a Pemmican Bar, and a set of white custom folders (which he calls “fangles,” starting with eight 1/2 by 11-inch envelopes that were all cut by hired printers) ultimately became part of Nelson's unique filing system. This system is a source of entertainment for his acquaintances until they lend him something, at which point it becomes an exasperating affair. Nelson's long-time collaborator and habitual victim Roger Gregory says, “If you ask Ted for a book you lent him, he’ll say, ‘I’ve archived it, so I’ll buy you a new one.’” For a time, Nelson wore a purple belt made from two dog collars, which delighted him because he liked to find innovative uses for things.
Nelson's life is filled with unfinished projects, which could be said to constitute his life, just as lace is made of holes, or Philip Johnson's glass house is made of windows. He wrote an unfinished autobiography and made an unfinished film. His yacht in the San Francisco Bay is filled with incomplete notes and unsigned letters. He started a video editing company but has yet to turn a profit. He has been working on a comprehensive philosophy called “General Schematics,” but the research texts remain in thousands of pieces, scattered across papers, index cards, and notepads.
All of Nelson's imagination has no equal standing. Each imagination comes from a great unfinished project for which he ultimately earned the fame he has pursued since childhood. In one of our conversations, Nelson explained that as a filmmaker or businessman, he has never succeeded, because “the first step of anything I want to do is ‘Xanadu.’”
“Xanadu,” a global hypertext publishing system, is the longest-running vaporware story in the history of the computer industry. It has been in development for over 30 years. This long gestation period may not compare to the Great Wall of China (which was under construction for most of the 16th century but still failed to stop invaders), but considering the relative youth of commercial computing, “Xanadu” has created a record of futility that is hard for other companies to surpass. In fact, Nelson only began to build his reputation as the king of failed software development around 1960, which makes “Xanadu” interesting for another reason: the failure of this project (or, from a more optimistic perspective, its long-delayed success) coincides almost perfectly with the birth of hacker culture. The manic and high-profile transition of “Xanadu” from triumph to bankruptcy reveals a side of hacker behavior that may be as important as the stories of those billion-dollar companies born in garages.
Among self-proclaimed insiders, Nelson's “Xanadu” is sometimes treated as a joke, but this is superficial. Nelson's writing and speaking inspired some of the most visionary computer programmers, managers, and executives, including Autodesk founder John Walker, who invested millions of dollars and years of effort into the project. “Xanadu” aimed to be a universal library, a global hypertext publishing tool, a system for resolving copyright disputes, and an elite forum for discussion and debate. By making all information accessible to everyone, “Xanadu” aimed to eliminate scientific ignorance and cure political misunderstandings. Moreover, based on the very stale assumption that global disasters are caused by ignorance, stupidity, and communication failures, “Xanadu” was supposed to save the world.
At the end of our brief but eerie lunch journey, Nelson's decrepit 1970 Ford came to a stop in front of the Spinnaker restaurant at Sausalito pier. As we sat at a table overlooking the bay, Nelson said he could paddle his kayak from his yacht to Spinnaker, mentioning that the water reminded him of his unfinished autobiography. “It’s a great beginning,” he said, “When I was four or five, I used to row with my grandparents, and my hands would be splashing in the water.”
Like other things in his life, Nelson's conversation is controlled by his aversion to endings. His speech has no periods, only commas, dashes, and ellipses.
“I remember thinking about the particles in the water, but I thought they were one, and they would separate around my fingers and reconnect on the other side, this constant separating and reconnecting and changing into new arrangements is—”
Suddenly, the monologue stopped, and Nelson reached into his gear bag. He picked up his tape recorder, tested it, and turned the microphone toward himself. “Well, I’m at Spinnaker,” he continued, “talking about that old story of the hand in the water, and how the feeling of separation and reconnection in the water left such a deep impression on me, and how all relationships are constantly changing—you can hardly hold on—you can, you can’t, you can’t really imagine or express the countless relationships.”
His grandfather's chaotic and brief whirlpool while rowing is a perfect reflection of Nelson's thought style. I had recorded our conversation, but Nelson clearly wanted his own record. Not because he was worried about being quoted correctly, but because his tape recorder and camera were weapons in the endless battle against forgetfulness. The inventor suffers from an extreme case of Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD), a psychological syndrome that was only recently named, characterized by an unusual sensitivity to external distractions.
If he stops doing something, he immediately forgets. Only by turning on his tape recorder can Nelson be sure that his words won’t drift irretrievably into the atmosphere.
Nelson's anxiety about forgetfulness is complicated by the medications he takes. For his ADD, Nelson takes Cylert; for anxiety, he takes Prozac; for insomnia, he takes Halcion. Halcion can cause aphasia: during our lunch, Nelson sometimes found himself groping for a common word in the middle of a sentence. But for the most part, he spoke fluently, and he was pleased with how well he articulated his thoughts. Although Nelson's disorder inconvenienced him, he took pride in it. “Attention Deficit Disorder was created by regular chauvinists,” he commented. “Regular chauvinists insist that you must do the same thing all the time, which drives us a little crazy. Attention Deficit Disorder—we need a more positive term to describe it. Hummingbird mind, I think would be better.”
The ultimate hypertext information system—“Xanadu”—began with Ted Nelson's pursuit of personal liberation. The inventor's hummingbird mind and his helplessness regarding anything left him relatively powerless. He wanted to be a writer and filmmaker, but he needed a way to avoid getting lost in the mad associations generated by his brain. His greatest inspiration was to imagine a computer program that could track all his different thinking and writing paths. For this branching, nonlinear writing concept, Nelson coined the term hypertext.
Although the concept of hypertext made Nelson a legend in programming circles, he is not a programmer. “My math is terrible,” Nelson said. “I still can’t figure out the total in my checkbook: I can add a column of numbers five times and get four different answers, but none of them is right. I’m prone to accidents and very impatient. I can’t use my Macintosh—I have three that don’t work at all, and one that barely does.”
“I never learned calculus well,” he added, pausing to pull out a camera and focus on the notebook next to his plate.
“Why are you filming your notebook?” I asked.
“I just want to keep this going,” he replied. Nelson was pleased with the operation of the camera, so he took it around the room. Then he put it down and continued his speech. His lunch, a large plate of pasta and seafood, had long since arrived, and he tasted it, then forgot all about it.
Nelson never cataloged the thousands of hours of audio and video tapes he had. This would have been impossible, as they were extensions of his real life, and it would have been unnecessary, as he had no intention of watching or studying them. He rented several storage spaces in the San Francisco Bay Area, filled with materials he left for posterity to interpret, he prayed that when scholars began to study his vast and chaotic works, they would have the necessary digital technology to analyze and track it. He insisted that this technology was “Xanadu.”
If “Xanadu” were merely a private obsession of a genius anti-iconoclast, the overflowing cabinets of Nelson would simply be trucked to the dump. But perhaps the inventor's prediction was correct; he predicted that the strange story of “Xanadu” would prove to be an important chapter in the history of technology. From Nelson's chaos emerged one of the most powerful designs of the 20th century. The goal of “Xanadu”—a universal library, a global information index, and a computerized royalty system—was shared by many of the smartest programmers among the first generation of hackers.
Ted Nelson's “Xanadu” tells the story of the dawn of the information age. Just like the character in Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow—who believes himself to be a mental patient of World War II—when the blitzkrieg comes, he feels his health suddenly improving, while during the “Battle of the Bulge,” he suffers from a terrible headache. Nelson's distractibility, lack of focus, obsession with minutiae, and his commitment to documenting events he would never analyze are manifestations of the information explosion on humanity.
Nelson recorded everything but remembered nothing. “Xanadu” was supposed to be his antidote. To assist in this process, he gathered a professional team, some of whom happened to be his closest friends and disciples.
In the end, the patient survived the operation. But it nearly cost the doctor his life.
Chapter Two#
In conversation, Nelson is sometimes reproachful, sometimes gleeful. Raised by elderly grandparents in Greenwich Village, Nelson was a dreamy, unathletic child. He invested his youth in learning the art of strategy, learning to pick up serious weapons like stones or sticks when bullied by neighbors. While studying graduate-level strategy at Harvard, Nelson would one day study strategy with the renowned theorist Thomas Schelling, but as a child, his methods were instinctual. For example, in second grade, Nelson invented a new way to cross the street: when he walked onto a busy street, he would dramatically avoid traffic and walk off the sidewalk with theatrical indifference. The drivers would be terrified and slam on their brakes.
Nelson's heroes were famous nonconformists and entrepreneurs, including Buckminster Fuller, Bertrand Russell, Walt Disney, H. L. Mencken, and Orson Welles. By his own account, he was a bright child, his language unusually grammatical, and his wise remarks would leave adults speechless. Nelson's father, a film director (who directed Requiem for a Heavyweight and Soldier Blue), kept in touch with his son and inspired young Nelson to start his own (unfinished) cinematic epic, The Epiphany of Slocum Furlow. When it came to his actress mother, Nelson simply said they had not communicated and had not spoken for a long time.
Nelson's hatred of traditional structures made it difficult for him to accept education. He felt bored and disgusted by school, once plotting to stab his seventh-grade teacher with a sharpened screwdriver, but at the last moment, he lost his nerve and walked out of the classroom, never to return. On his long walk home, he formulated four maxims to guide his life: Most people are fools, most authorities are evil, God does not exist, and everything is wrong. Nelson liked these maxims and often repeated them. In every discussion, they generated sympathy, with rejected ideas and discounted choices.
By the time Nelson reached college, his methods of combating regular chauvinists had matured considerably; he used the theories of writer Alfred Korzybski (Alfred Korzybski) to baffle his teachers, who accused all categories of being misleading. But this hatred of categories did not produce a vague, “be-here-now” mysticism in Nelson. Instead, he loved words, which are tools of memory, but he hated the traditional writing and editing methods that imposed a false and limited order. Nelson was uninterested in the smooth, progressive narratives found in books. He wanted everything to be preserved in all its chaotic flow so it could be reconstructed as needed.
Nelson, a lonely child raised in a nontraditional family, became an opponent of forgetfulness, a denier of all forms of loss and grief. (Some of Nelson's disciples would one day push this war against loss further and commit to developing cryonics technology to freeze and preserve corpses.) Nelson was tormented by his faulty memory, developing the habit that only a technology for preserving all knowledge could prevent the destruction of life on Earth. The idea that some mental connection or relationship might disappear was intolerable. Nelson believed that not only did the constant fluctuations and dispersions of his own thoughts devastate him personally, but humanity's universal forgetfulness was a suicidal act on a global scale, as it condemned humanity to irrationally repeat its mistakes.
Chapter Three#
Nelson earned a Bachelor of Arts in philosophy from Swarthmore College and became a graduate student at Harvard University in 1960. Hypertext was invented during his first year at Harvard when, as a semester project, Nelson attempted to create a “writing system” that would allow users to store their work, modify it, and print it out. Compared to the first experimental word processing programs, Nelson's design included alternative versions of text side by side, the ability to backtrack through sequential versions, and outline-based modifications. Nelson developed a habit that would persist, but he failed to complete the coding and had to take an incomplete course.
Although Nelson initially intended to earn a Ph.D. in social relations, his efforts to complete the semester project quickly overshadowed his other courses. Meanwhile, a group of researchers at Harvard was trying to create a program to replace the daily teaching drudgery with computer processing.
Nelson believed this linear, mechanical approach, known as computer-assisted instruction, was an insult to both students and computers, and he urged the adoption of a system that would allow students to explore academic materials along various paths. He called for the establishment of a system based on “non-sequential writing.”
The term hypertext was coined by Nelson and published in a paper presented at the 1965 National Computer Conference. In designing the non-sequential writing tool, he also proposed a feature called “compressed lists,” in which elements in one text would link to related or identical elements in another text. Nelson's two interests, screen editing and non-sequential writing, were merging. Using compressed lists, links could be established between large sections, small sections, entire pages, or individual paragraphs. Authors and readers could create a unique document by following a set of links that compressed discrete documents together.
The concept of hypertext has many precedents in literature and science. For example, The Talmud is a form of hypertext, with comment blocks arranged in concentric rectangular patterns around the page. Academic footnotes are similar, with numbered links between the main text and supplementary scholarship.
In July 1945, long before Nelson turned his attention to electronic information systems, Vannevar Bush published an article titled As We May Think in The Atlantic Monthly, describing a hypothetical information storage and retrieval system called “memex.” Memex would allow readers to create personal indexes of documents and link paragraphs from different documents using special markers. While Bush's description was purely speculative, he provided a brilliant and influential preview of some of the features Nelson was trying to implement in “Xanadu.”
The inventor's original hypertext design predicted many of the basic components of today's hypertext systems. Nevertheless, his influence on the American Computer Association was minimal. There was a brief interest in the strange researcher, but despite the intriguing nature of his ideas, Nelson lacked the technical knowledge to prove that the system he envisioned was feasible.
This new hypertext prophet had a hard time finding a pulpit. Over the next four years, Nelson drifted between many companies and research projects. He was hired by publishing giant Harcourt to advise them on computer-based business opportunities, and his radical rhetoric left executives baffled. Meanwhile, he seized every opportunity to tell computer scientists that they did not understand the earth-shattering significance of their work, which annoyed them. Despite these missteps, the inventor's private exploration of hypertext continued. He soon entered the most complex theoretical realms, posing some questions that still challenge hypertext designers today. For example, what happens to all the links when you change a document? Can you edit a document while retaining its links? What happens when you follow a link to a paragraph that has been deleted?
Computers in the 1960s were huge machines, primarily accessible to hobbyists at university computer centers, where students could divert their attention from scientific assignments with simple question-and-answer games. But for insiders, the trend toward increasingly smaller and faster digital tools was already apparent, and some wondered how computers could handle basic personal information tasks like editing term papers. In 1969, Nelson was hanging around Brown University, where an early word processing tool was being developed. The focus of the Brown project was a system that could output paper, but Nelson believed that paper was hopelessly retrogressive, and the native realm of hypertext was on the screen, not on the page. Later that year, Nelson obtained permission from Vladimir Nabokov‘s Pale Fire publisher to use this carefully annotated parody in a hypertext demonstration. Like most of Nelson's contributions, this idea was vetoed by the sponsors of the Brown experiment. Nelson was pained by the obstruction of his work. “So progress must wait,” he later wrote, “waiting for the stutterers and limpers to catch up.”
Nelson's unique anger persisted and undermined him during this difficult period after college. His most productive time in short-term jobs may have been in 1967 when he worked at Harcourt. Although he made no technical progress, he created a powerful trademark. The literary professionals at the publishing house were impressed by him, and to impress them, he named his hypertext system “Xanadu.”
It is an exceptionally precise name. “Xanadu” is the palace meticulously built by Kublai Khan.
In the famous story of the origin of this poem, Coleridge claimed to wake from an anesthetic reverie with hundreds of lines of poetry in his head. Just as he was about to transcribe them, a visitor interrupted him, and when he returned to his writing desk, that vivid, dreamlike composition had vanished. In the preface he wrote for the remaining fragments, he lamented:
The charm
Is broken - all that phantom-world so fair
Vanishes, and a thousand circlets spread,
And each mis-shape[s] the other....
Coleridge's fragment lingers in Nelson's grand hypertext design, just as **Orson Welles was inspired. Commanding “Xanadu” is a foretelling of the heartbreaking moments to come in the years ahead.
Chapter Four#
If Nelson could delve into the technical reasons that computer people found his “Xanadu” unconvincing, he might have been too discouraged to continue. The kind of programs he spoke of required enormous memory and processing power. Even today, the technology to implement a global “Xanadu” network does not exist. Back in the 1970s, when Nelson was still engaged in his first phase of activities, even simple word processing programs required users to share time on large mainframes. The concept of a global network composed of billions of rapidly accessible and interlinked documents was absurd; only Nelson's ignorance of advanced software allowed him to pursue this fantasy. The inventor was like a juggler practicing acrobatics on the edge of an invisible cliff. A glance at the abyss would surely make him fall.
Others working in computing were not so optimistic. In seeking help, Nelson was forced to leave official channels. His first disciples belonged to a group of hackers known as R.E.S.I.S.T.O.R.S. (Radically Emphatic Students Interested in Science, Technology, and Other Research Studies), who had a strong interest in science, technology, and other research. Unlike the mainstream programmers Nelson encountered, these Resistors shared his sense of humor, mischief, and disrespect for authority. Another advantage was that they did not need salaries, as most of them still lived with their parents. These Resistors were members of a computer club in Princeton, New Jersey, and their average age was about 15. Nelson had a lifelong influence on some of them. Nearly 20 years later, when 14-year-old Lauren Sarno met Nelson as a Resistor, she later became his personal assistant. In 1987, Sarno spent thousands of hours reconstructing Nelson's masterpiece Computer Lib for reprinting by Microsoft Press.
The Resistors were grateful to Nelson for taking their suggestions seriously. “Some people are too proud to ask kids for information,” Nelson preached in Computer Lib. “That’s stupid. Information is where you find it.” These teenage Resistors spent considerable time cruising around with Nelson in his car, telling crude jokes, and planning to transform civilization. Their favorite activity was word games. One anecdote about the Resistors describes an afternoon when he and his buddies were wandering around Princeton, increasingly annoyed by the contradictory loud instructions coming from the back seat. “I asked for triple redundancy in the directions,” Nelson said.
“Just ahead, you’re about to turn,” one teenager piped up immediately.
From a photo taken at that time, Nelson, wearing a white shirt and tie, with hair hanging down to his collar, is grinning widely, sitting at the wheel of a car full of kids. He looks very happy.
While continuing to work with the high school students, Nelson secured some funding from a private investor and used it to recruit programmer Cal Daniels from Minicomputer Systems Inc. and a young Swarthmore student who knew Fortran. Nelson frequently shuttled between his Manhattan apartment, the Swarthmore campus, and Daniels' large house in Queens, recalling that this time was “talking about systems, discussing details.” From all angles, this was mostly talk. But during a rare intense programming period, the three collaborators created an interesting data structure to control the movement of large texts in computer memory. They called their invention “enfilade.”
The dictionary defines enfilade as a type of sweeping fire, which can be both a noun and a verb. Etymologically, the word relates to threads and files, as well as the layout of rooms, where doors align with each other, and the views between columns or trees.
Unfortunately, aside from the dictionary, there are no further clues about the nature of enfilade: this discovery is one of “Xanadu's” closely guarded trade secrets, and all who worked on it were forbidden to disclose its inner nature. This silence naturally generated doubts about the world-historical significance of enfilade. When asked why he did not allow anything to be published about the invention, Nelson quickly responded with anger. “Because it’s still hot dog shit,” he said.
The discovery of enfilade and the discoverer's commitment to secrecy marked a turning point for “Xanadu.” The first real work had been completed, and a concession to secrecy had been made for the first time. “Xanadu” was now more than just a grand vision and a set of original ideas—it was now a proprietary software package, tightly linked to its design concept, and its intellectual influence was closely tied to market shifts.
In 1972, Daniels completed the first demonstration version of the software. Daniels wrote some original “Xanadu” code in a now-defunct programming language, running on the Nova computer rented by Nelson. However, before he could show a working “Xanadu” system to any potential supporters, Nelson unexpectedly ran out of cash and was forced to return the Nova. The programmers had usable code but no machine. (Later, they would have machines but no usable code.) Just as Nelson failed to complete his college hypertext project in the mid-1960s, this bankruptcy was also a milestone for “Xanadu,” as it established the coincidence of near success and sudden poverty as one of “Xanadu's” inevitable themes.
After this failure, Nelson drifted closer to the margins of the computer industry. In 1973, he found a job at the University of Illinois in Chicago, where he quickly discovered he could not get along with his colleagues. As hopes of gaining respect in the computing world dwindled, Nelson moved in a new direction. He spent some time building his system. He also spent a period of time talking about it incessantly. He began to reach beyond his voice range, appealing to a more general public.
His transformation came at just the right time. When the inventor first learned about fields outside the mainframe realm, his plan was to reach out and install a decent information network. However, as advocates of American towns discovered long ago, there was no need to build anything to profit from the establishment of new territories. You just needed to survey the land and then sell it to wishful pioneers. Nelson failed to establish his own information infrastructure, but he designed a very beautiful vision of the future.
Isolated at the University of Illinois, Nelson began writing an impassioned book, part gospel, part political pamphlet, and part real estate brochure, extolling the benefits of life on the digital frontier. When Nelson began working on it, he expected to print about 40 pages of typescript on ordinary 8.2×11-inch paper. By the summer of 1974, after 18 months of frantic labor and weeks of cutting and pasting around the clock, Nelson held a chaotic 1,200-page manuscript in his hands.
Chapter Five#
“Any idiot can understand computers, and many do,” Nelson announced in the introduction to the first edition of Computer Lib in 1974. His work is actually two books, bound upside down together, like old playing cards, or as Nelson liked to point out, like an Italian/Polish joke book. One cover displays a revolutionary fist inside a computer. When readers flip the book open, they see the cover of Dream Machines, adorned with an image of a pilot in a superhero cape reaching out to touch a screen.** The book is large, 11 inches wide and 16 inches tall, containing a 300,000-word manifesto of the digital revolution. The print is small, and the layout is chaotic. Nelson typed his draft on a typewriter, which included hundreds of personal comments; then cut and pasted them onto cardboard; took the pages to the printer; and weeks later returned to pick up several boxes of books. When he discovered that about a third of the pages of the book were out of order, he had the printer take apart the defective books, proofread them, and rebind them. Between 1974 and 1987, when Microsoft Press reprinted Computer Lib, Nelson sold at least 100 copies of his manifesto each month, sometimes even more.
As an expression of the encyclopedic passion of an author, Computer Lib contains anything that Nelson felt angered or inspired him during the months he wrote the book, including demographics, hacker psychology, the evil of IBM, holography, a list of PDP-8 rental locations, the Watergate scandal, and how to program in Trac. These comments “do not fit anywhere else, so they are best here,” are typical transitions in Computer Lib. The model for this book is Stewart Brand's 1969 counterculture classic Whole Earth Catalog, but Computer Lib is designed more uniquely. There is no index or table of contents. Specific citations or chapters cannot be found. Although there are many references, it cannot be used as a reference without sufficient reading time to memorize. Of course, this is precisely what many young hackers did.
What most moved the hackers reading Computer Lib was not the instructions on how to write program loops in APL, but something more radical. Computer Lib endowed programmers with a noble role in the battle for humanity's future and recruited them into the rebellion they witnessed on college campuses. When programmers read Computer Lib, they could see the ideal reader of the book—a concerned, skeptical, interested, wise, free-thinking citizen who wanted better digital tools. In the era of Computer Lib, this popular audience for news about the digital revolution did not exist. But for those who revered Computer Lib as a bible, they hoped such an audience would exist. Computer Lib reflected an idealized image of themselves back to computer programmers. In this sense, the book was much more subtle than Nelson intended to write.
Chapter Six#
Roger Gregory, Ted Nelson's most loyal collaborator, is a sad man. He suffers from a common debilitating disease, the same one that afflicted Abraham Lincoln, known as “the hypos.” His sadness sometimes becomes so intense that he cannot work; his black melancholy can be traced back many, many years.
When Gregory first heard of Ted Nelson, he was a science fiction fan working at a second-hand computer store called Newman Computer Exchange in Ann Arbor, Michigan. He had thick hair, wore dirty clothes, and tended to argue fiercely with those he thought were wrong. His job was frustrating because he never played with any functional “toys”—cabinets the size of refrigerators filled with the latest digital machines. Once Gregory repaired some hopelessly damaged computer equipment, his boss Al Newman would sell it. Gregory hacked in various computer labs at the University of Michigan and belonged to a social group—the Ann Arbor Computing Club—whose members overlapped with the local science fiction club.
Gregory was introduced to Nelson by programmer friend and Computer Lib reader Michael McClary. It was 1974, and elsewhere in America, the counterculture was in its last throes of false victory. This revolution came late for computer scientists, but it did arrive, leading many to shed their white shirts and pocket protectors and question whether their disciplines were servile, primarily devoted to making money and waging war. Like Gregory, McClary was also a fan of Robert Heinlein, who invited Gregory to hitch a ride to Washington for the annual science fiction convention. They strolled through the old Ford galaxy in the Appalachian Mountains, along with three other jerks from science fiction, while McClary preached the gospel of “Xanadu.” McClary explained that Nelson's idea was that computers were resources in people's hands. With a global publishing system, the need for printing presses could be eliminated. Censorship would be difficult, if not impossible. Moreover, building such a system would be a lot of fun. McClary gave Gregory a pamphlet promoting Nelson's new book.
The cultural genes of this inventor were transmitted indirectly, and there could not have been a more perfect host. Gregory possessed the skills that Nelson lacked: a deep understanding of hardware, a wealth of programming talent, and a keen interest in how machines worked.
Gregory intended to call Nelson, but fate intervened more quickly: just as he returned to Ann Arbor, Nelson called Newman Computer Exchange, asking the person on the line to trade a thousand copies of Computer Lib for a used PDP-11.
The PDP-11 from Digital Equipment Corporation was a coveted machine. It was one of the first computers to run a new programming language called C, which was becoming the standard for hackers. Coincidentally, Gregory did not have an extra PDP-11 on hand. But he seized the opportunity to challenge some of Nelson's reckless predictions in Computer Lib, to which Nelson responded with a slick and scathing diatribe about the conservative ignorance of the computer industry.
Gregory's temper had once led him to wrest a shotgun from two would-be thieves and chase them out of his home; he finally found someone unafraid to go toe-to-toe with him. Gregory's dismissive contempt might sting, but Nelson's speculative fervor was unbearable. Over the next few years, Gregory spent hundreds of dollars on long-distance phone discussions about hypertext projects.
Did Nelson realize he had met the second parent of “Xanadu”? Probably not. The inventor spread his ideas as widely as possible, hardly caring where they landed. But decades later, it was Gregory who oversaw the attempts to transform “Xanadu” into a real product. Gregory never received much public attention, but after experiencing all the painful deaths and rebirths of this project, his commitment to Nelson's dream of establishing a universal hypertext library never waned. If Ted Nelson was the extravagant father of “Xanadu,” Roger Gregory was its loyal mother, whose role seems intertwined with a terrible sacrifice.
Chapter Seven#
Shortly after the release of Computer Lib, Nelson fled the unfriendly confines of the University of Illinois and found refuge at Swarthmore College. In the 1960s, he also first conceived his hypertext design at this quiet undergraduate campus. Swarthmore offered him a non-departmental position to teach his own work; Nelson taught courses on social issues related to technology and design.
While at Swarthmore, another important disciple emerged.
In 1976, Mark Miller, an insecure 19-year-old, came to speak in a classroom filled with Ted Nelson's students. He was nervous. A year earlier, as a freshman at Yale, he had read Computer Lib, which filled him with fantasies about the digital future. Miller was very interested in computers and hoped to make a small contribution to a society based on reason, free will, and scientific principles. Nelson's work described a global community united by perfect information, which seemed to be the most important milestone on the road to this utopia.
As a guest speaker in Nelson's class, Miller shared his thoughts on a software system similar to “Xanadu.” Later, one of the students, Stuart Greene, found him. Miller asked Greene what he thought of his ideas. Not very well, Greene told him. As usual, the whole class did not understand. They could hardly comprehend what Nelson was saying, and when Miller delivered a similar passionate monologue, Greene laughed, their reaction being, “Oh no, we can’t believe there’s another one!”
The Yale student was not discouraged. Miller was a disheveled mathematician, a bit goofy and a bit elusive. He liked to point out that his name was a pun on computer programming: after all, software code is made up of symbols, and milling is stirring or grinding. A photo shows Miller smiling, his shirt pocket stuffed with pens, wearing a pair of Mickey Mouse ears. Miller thought Nelson's denial of human forgetfulness seemed right, and he hoped to create a system that would capture his consciousness in computer programs, thus achieving immortality. Miller's middle name is Samuel, which he spelled as $amuel to express his faith in the market's ability to meet all human needs.
Nelson's book brought him increasing acclaim, and in 1979, he decided it was time to summon his disciples. He called upon Roger Gregory to lead the effort. Although Gregory was in Ann Arbor, Nelson insisted that everyone move to Swarthmore so he could exert his influence up close. Gregory dutifully rented a house and invited other programmers to join him. Mark Miller returned to Pennsylvania, where “Xanadu” enthusiasts planned to complete the project in a single, serious coding summer.
That summer was the golden age of “Xanadu.” During long afternoons and evenings, programmers sat on the porch, scribbling on blackboards, contemplating the difficulty of writing truly effective hypertext code. Although they planned to write code for the system during the three months Miller was away from Yale, they spent most of their time discussing data structures and redesigning. The biggest challenge was creating a way to move data quickly in and out of the computer's memory. Since hypertext links could connect an infinite number of documents, every piece of text in the system had to be immediately accessible. Nelson was convinced they were making significant contributions to computer science. He believed the latest version of the data search algorithm, known as General Enfilade Theory, would allow the “Xanadu” system to evolve indefinitely without its performance degrading to unacceptable levels.
Most computer scientists would be skeptical of these claims, but this did not bother the programmers, who worked in an atmosphere of friendly competition and camaraderie. They might not always agree with Nelson's overly optimistic predictions, but they all believed that Gregory's large, chaotic house in Swarthmore was nurturing a social and scientific revolution.
The issue of computer performance was critical. That summer, Gregory was programming on a borrowed Sol 20, a machine from a company called Processor Technologies. Soon, he abandoned the effort to hammer the Sol into something more useful and decided to buy a new Onyx, with a disk capacity of 10 megabytes. The Onyx also had 128 kilobytes of memory, which later doubled to an astonishing 256 kilobytes. Looking back at the details of these efforts, the “Xanadu” programmers' approach seemed impractical. Gregory and his colleagues were trying to build a universal library on a machine that could barely edit and search the text of a book.
“Summer went slower than we imagined,” Gregory recalled. Greene, Miller, and Gregory made some progress in design, and in August, they wrote some code. But the real world began to exert pressure on them, and as summer ended, they set off in different directions. There were many tasks to complete—education to finish, careers to start—and the fantasy of “Xanadu” was unsustainable.
Perhaps apart from Gregory. Compared to the colorful landscape of “Xanadu,” the flat terrain of Gregory's daily life resembled the farmlands of Kansas. While he knew how to fix and program computers well, he was neither a computer scientist nor an elite researcher, and his ongoing sadness compelled him to seek a fate greater than transforming companies and commercial machines. In dealing with his depression, Gregory found it helpful to do something productive; the computer was always there, and when he felt sad, he knew he could sit in a chair, stare at the screen, and start hacking. By the summer of 1979, Gregory had become deeply entangled in another world of “Xanadu,” unable to break free. Gregory knew that if he were to escape, his route would be through “Xanadu,” not away from it.
By September, Gregory was living in Pennsylvania and had rented another house. As programmers came and went, this house provided a framework for the slow development of “Xanadu.” Gregory worked full-time on external consulting contracts to support “Xanadu” and worked about 40 hours a week on the project, opening his home to anyone he thought could help. Mark Miller had already returned to Yale to begin his senior year, but he stayed in touch and continued to offer advice. Eric Hill and Roland King joined the household. Eric Drexler, a graduate student obsessed with solar sails and nanomachines for space travel, was a frequent visitor and friendly critic.
After using the Onyx, Gregory began searching for a new computer and became the first person to purchase a Sun without government or educational institution funding in 1982. It was extremely expensive—$26,000. The serial number was 82. With the Sun and a new 80-megabyte hard drive, priced at $10,000, “Xanadu” code finally had a decent home.
As the second decade of “Xanadu” development began, Nelson was pleased with the project’s management. The last time he had been so close to having a working prototype was in 1972, when his rented Nova was running out of time. Now, the inventor's ideas were more mature. Miller and Gregory created an addressing system using hyperdimensional numbers, a mysterious field of calculus they had both studied in college. They called the new addressing system “tumblers”; the tumbler system allowed readers to create links to any byte span, regardless of whether the author had marked them. Through tumbler, Miller and Gregory could provide similar addresses for every document and document fragment containing words, images, films, and sounds in “Xanadu.” The address would not only direct readers to the correct machine but also indicate the document's author, the document's version, the correct byte span, and the links associated with those bytes.
Unfortunately, despite the novel design and interesting algorithms, frustratingly, the “Xanadu” code was nonfunctional. As 1979 stretched into 1980 and 1980 into 1981, Nelson continued to tell the story of the greatest information software ever about to be released. He promised that “Xanadu” would render the core concepts of computing—such as files—obsolete. In “Xanadu,” there would be no fixed files, only a wealth of materials that could be organized according to readers' preferences.
In 1980, genius Miller graduated from Yale but failed to return to Gregory's house. Instead, he moved to Datapoint, a hardware company in San Antonio, Texas, which was then a leader in networking technology. Stuart Greene was already an employee at Datapoint, and Miller continued to work in the company's advanced research lab, where Nelson later joined them. The shift to Datapoint was a concession to reality and an acknowledgment that the most important aspect of the Swarthmore team's work to date was design rather than coding. At Datapoint, “Xanadu” programmers could explore their ideas in a company environment that provided the latest equipment and decent salaries.
Gregory continued to advance the project. In the early 1980s, the “Xanadu” programming team disbanded, Nelson moved to Texas, and Gregory left Pennsylvania. He returned to Michigan, where he and several “Xanadu” kibitzers lived in a friend's apartment. For a time, Gregory and his hacker pals camped out in a suburban temporary residence, where a sympathetic hippie couple provided them with food, encouragement, and help finding jobs. “Xanadu,” after years of eager hope, had become a charity, its survival dependent on the goodwill of friends.
Chapter Eight#
From its optimistic expansion decade, by 1984 it had collapsed into a small circle of hackers gathered around Roger Gregory. Although the scope of the hypertext dream had shrunk, it still possessed a powerful gravitational field. Few had touched it, able to break free completely. Instead, programmers tended to leave on elliptical orbits, taking them far away and then ultimately bringing them back.
For example, the programmer Michael McClary, who had introduced Gregory to the concept of hypertext a decade earlier, briefly joined the “Xanadu” project after returning to Michigan. McClary was taciturn and a hippie; when he became enamored with “Xanadu,” he was an expert at writing lengthy, complex programs in C. His approach was to spend days absorbing the design, carefully planning his method, and then implementing his plan in long stretches of sustained focus. According to his colleagues, McClary spent about three times as long as most programmers developing the first version, but his first attempts were often successful.
When Gregory returned to Michigan, McClary noticed that Gregory had rejected the suggestion to formalize the business arrangements of “Xanadu.” No contracts, no paperwork, no organization. Gregory and his informal assistants took extensive notes but never brought them up again. Gregory held weekly meetings to try to decide what to do next, but the meetings did not discuss programming requirements; instead, they meandered from personal attacks to grand philosophical musings. After months of this process, McClary was left with the impression that he was not part of a software development team but rather a faction in a self-destructive process. McClary also noticed that there was no evidence that the hackers might have any claim to their labor. When Gregory was asked about ownership, he casually explained that someday everyone would get a fair share. McClary looked at Gregory, yielding to his natural emotional volatility, feeling disappointed by years of unproductive work, and drove away his colleague. After a confrontation between Gregory and McClary, McClary ultimately withdrew from the project.
However, there was still a glimmer of hope. In 1987, Nelson revised Literary Machines, a book about hypertext he had first published in 1981. The style of this book is pure Nelson: it has a chapter 0, seven chapter 1s, a chapter 2, and seven chapter 3s. In his introduction, Nelson suggests that readers start with chapter one, then read chapter two, then explore chapter three, and then start over, rereading chapter two. He also provides a chart that reads: “Pretzel (size) or infinity, you decide.” The official title page reads: Literary Machines: A Report on the “Xanadu” Project, concerning the World Processing, Electronic Publishing, Hypertext, Universal Craftsman, and some other topics including Knowledge, Education, and Freedom.
But there was no money to turn the carefully designed ideas in Nelson's book into something concrete. Even Roger Gregory began to lose heart. With the exception of Gregory, all the major “Xanadu” programmers were actively involved in other work. By the mid-1980s, the most rational hope for “Xanadu” was that through the work of Miller, Greene, and others scattered across companies around the world, the project would indirectly exercise its power. Miller was now an emerging professional, having moved to Xerox PARC, the birthplace of many of the most important designs in the personal computer industry.
For the “parents” of “Xanadu,” things were much more difficult. Gregory continued to collect incomplete “Xanadu” code, regularly reporting to potential funders, but he could not spark their interest. Nelson was living in San Antonio at the time, and after Datapoint collapsed due to financial scandals, he began to struggle financially.
Extreme pain accompanied his anger at setbacks, yet he felt powerless to grieve and continued to move forward. Around this time, Nelson contemplated suicide, even holding the pills in his hand. He concluded his revised Literary Machines with a farewell statement: “We have held on to the ideal created long ago in different times and places, which is the best ideal we could find. We have brought these flags to this new place, and we now plant them, hoping to see them wave in the wind. But here it is dark, silent, and lonely, and there is no dawn.”
“Xanadu” hackers may never have realized their designs, but they had a profound foresight of the information crisis that would arise from digital technology. When they envisioned a future of many-to-many communication, universal digital publishing, links between documents, and infinite storage capacity, they were absolutely accurate. When they began, they had already surpassed their time. But by the mid-1980s, they were just beginning to lead.
Chapter Nine#
Around 1980, Gayle Pergamit first heard of “Xanadu” and realized that Nelson's vision and Gregory's tenacity could bring revolutionary change to the software industry. She also realized that this effort was failing. Pergamit's husband Phil Salin wrote a research report that helped guide the breakup of the Bell system. He was well-versed in computers and fascinated by ideas about the electronic information market. In the 1980s, Salin created a computer network for selling and exchanging data and expertise. He worked closely with business consultant Pergamit. Pergamit was sympathetic and had an unusual understanding of programmers' needs, making her an ideal liaison between managers, vendors, and hackers. Pergamit sympathized with Nelson and Gregory's pursuits, but she also saw that both of them, especially Gregory, needed help.
“At that time,” Pergamit recalled, “you could open the San Jose Mercury News and browse page after page of ads for computer programmers. In Ann Arbor, programmers couldn’t find jobs. Forget about funding—they couldn’t even find jobs.”
Pergamit and Salin urged Gregory to move west. Like Nelson, Gregory disliked throwing anything away, and the prospect of moving his collection of old computers and thousands of books across the country was daunting. But in 1983, he yielded, dragging a variety of hacked “Xanadu” hardware with him. Unfortunately, Pergamit and Salin's analysis was only partially accurate; although Gregory found work in Silicon Valley, “Xanadu” was fading.
Gregory certainly would not admit failure. He maintained a life support system for “Xanadu,” including a mailbox and several printed promotional materials—like a staff directory for “Xanadu,” with Ted Nelson listed first as “Director,” Roger Gregory second as “System Anarchist”; Mark Miller described as “Hacker,” Phil Salin as “Accelerator,” and Gayle Pergamit as “Hidden Variable.”
One member of the “Xanadu” directory held the title of “Speaker-to-Bankers,” but if he was speaking, the bankers were not listening. Over the years, Gregory had become a regular at programmer conventions, where he showcased an unconvincing “Xanadu” demonstration. His natural habitat was hacker conferences, which were annual, invitation-only secret gatherings originally depicted in Steven Levy's bestselling book Hackers. Over the years, the number of hackers had grown, becoming the main gathering of unofficial computer elites.
In 1987, during the hacker 3.0 era, Gregory worked at Cirrus Logic, feeling a bit disgruntled. He took time to attend a secret meeting that would be held that fall at a Jewish camp in Saratoga, California. Programmers stayed in cabins on stilts, meeting in a rustic great room with a stone fireplace. They showcased virtual reality helmets, Coca-Cola batteries, and a mobile robot named Louis; there were also discussions about viruses and worms, neural networks, fractals, and the question posed at 2:45 PM on Saturday: “Can hackers get big?”
One participant was a hacker who had recently made it big. At one of the meetings, Autodesk's legendary founder John Walker sat stiffly beside an open window, wearing a short-sleeved shirt with the collar open and black-framed glasses. Walker was still at the helm of the company he founded, which had grown from $15,000 in sales in 1983 to over $54 million in 1987. He knew little about Gregory's labor but had heard of “Xanadu.”
Over the years, Roger Gregory had numerous conversations with many investors. Investors would talk to Gregory at one meeting, become interested, schedule appointments, visit the site where “Xanadu” happened to be located, check out the various parts of the system Gregory had managed to piece together, return to their companies, write memos describing what they had seen, and then never speak to Gregory again.
Walker was different. He had described Autodesk as an organization composed of people who would rather write a book than spend ten minutes on the phone. Walker realized that the code for “Xanadu” was not finished, but he also noted that “Xanadu” had never benefited from serious commercial development. He suspected that with Autodesk's help, “Xanadu” could transform from a cult into a company. Autodesk was originally founded to provide a way for its original partners (the programmers) to produce and sell tools. When the founders of Autodesk wrote an enthusiastic article about “Xanadu,” their executives tended to pay attention.
After Walker's proposal, tense negotiations ensued between the two parties. Phil Salin and Roger Gregory spent months working with Autodesk's lawyers. Soon, the informal business arrangements of “Xanadu” personnel began to trouble them. Ted Nelson insisted that any sale or licensing to Autodesk could not interfere with the inventor's grand plans for a universal library and publishing system. Nelson wanted to ensure that if Autodesk had a usable product, he would have complete freedom to use it in his “Xanadu” information franchise.
Autodesk did not care about becoming the McDonald's of cyberspace; its plans focused on commercial tools for sharing, distributing, and editing documents. Nevertheless, it was not easy to draft a contract that would define Nelson's freedom to use “Xanadu” technology and Autodesk's ownership of that technology. Ultimately, the solution reached by Salin, Gregory, and Autodesk was called “The Silver Agreement,” which generously granted Nelson the exclusive right to establish a patent-based publishing system using any “Xanadu” technology developed by Gregory and Autodesk. Nelson was allowed to use the name “Xanadu”; the new company was called “Xanadu Operating Company,” primarily owned by Autodesk.
One benefit of the “Silver Agreement” was that it allowed programmers to develop commercial applications of “Xanadu” under Autodesk's guidance without the ongoing interference of its demanding founder. Nelson would be granted a prestigious title of “Autodesk Fellow” and have an office at Autodesk headquarters, but he had no direct role in managing software development. This arrangement was important because, although Nelson's speeches were inspiring, his high self-esteem, coupled with his evident difficulties in organizing and completing tasks, made him an inefficient manager. By granting Nelson exclusive rights to use “Xanadu” in any patent-based publishing scheme, Autodesk believed it was giving the inventor what he wanted most while retaining the most important business decisions about what “Xanadu” would become and how it would be sold. However, over time, the partners would find ambiguities in “The Silver Agreement.” “In retrospect,” one former executive of “Xanadu” remarked, “I think the lawyer who drafted that agreement should be shot.”
However, in 1988, the deal with Autodesk was nothing but good news. On April 6, John Walker issued a press release announcing that Autodesk would acquire 80% of “Xanadu.” The remaining portion would be shared by the programmers and various individuals who had funded Nelson and Gregory over the years. Autodesk provided Gregory with stable employment and enough development support to help him complete the long-delayed project. Autodesk promised that “Xanadu” would be on the market within 18 months.
“In 1964,” Walker confidently announced, “’Xanadu’ was a dream in the hearts of men. By 1980, it was a common goal of a small group of outstanding technicians. By 1989, it would be a product. By 1995, it would begin to change the world.”
Gregory entered hacker 3.0 under a cloud. By the middle of the following summer, he had become the chief programmer at a software company with an annual research budget approaching $1 million.
Chapter Ten#
John Walker's Autodesk created the dominant software in the field of computer-aided design. The acquisition of “Xanadu” reflected Walker's hope that Autodesk could also become a pioneer in virtual reality, information markets, and space exploration. In addition to “Xanadu,” Autodesk also acquired Phil Salin's information exchange company—American Information Exchange (AMIX). In a memo to the company, Walker declared to his colleagues, “Reality is not enough.”
For the programmers of “Xanadu,” Autodesk's investment in 1988 reversed all the directions of the project's history. More than six programmers reassembled. Cash flow also reversed; suddenly, “Xanadu” began to support Gregory, rather than Gregory supporting “Xanadu.” Nelson, who had always been a nuisance, was safely tucked away at Autodesk's Sausalito headquarters. The programmers' offices were located over an hour south of California Highway 280 in Palo Alto.
The hackers of “Xanadu” had always relied on the support of friends and strangers, accustomed to working on the margins of indifferent institutions, and finally had the opportunity to establish their own working conditions, creating an environment very conducive to creative work. Gregory's response to this freedom was touching. According to one programmer, his contract with Autodesk provided him with a budget specifically to ensure comfortable furniture and nutritious food in the office.
Mark Miller succumbed to the allure of “Xanadu,” returning to the project full-time. The newly renovated “Xanadu” base on California Avenue resembled the environment of Xerox PARC. The programmers' offices opened onto a large communal space, with walls covered in whiteboards, which soon became filled with colorful lines, text, circles, and a tangle of curves.
Gayle Pergamit helped “Xanadu” establish some basic accounting and procurement systems, but the programmers' attention never focused on business details. Instead, they seized the opportunity to contact everyone they thought might help them in the final 18 months. Besides Miller, Dean Tribble also came from Xerox PARC. Other programmers who had contributed over the years, including Eric Hill and Roland King, also joined the team.
Through a combination of stock and salary, the “Xanadu” team also attracted Michael McClary to California. McClary had extensive experience in obtaining vague guidance from technical managers and translating it into a large amount of usable programs in C. He abandoned his profitable consulting business in Michigan and rejoined a project that had been unfinished for nearly a decade.
The least likely new hire for “Xanadu” was Marc Stiegler, who became the project manager. Stiegler was a mild-mannered software developer who had just published a science fiction novel, David's Sling, which featured a scene where a hypertext system saves the world. After nine years in the software industry, Stiegler had made enough money to take a break. However, the daunting record of failures for “Xanadu” still attracted him.
Before the acquisition by Autodesk, Stiegler had met Nelson at a Microsoft-sponsored CD-ROM conference, where he found himself in front of an audience of 1,000 listening to a speaker he did not recognize. He was looking at a very amateurish “Xanadu” flyer while listening to Ted Nelson's manic speech. Stiegler's first impulse was to laugh. Then, like many early “Xanadu” recruits, he was struck by something in Nelson's proposal that transcended reason. Through the original printed materials of “Xanadu” and Nelson's barely convincing speech, Stiegler felt he was hearing a call from the future. “Honestly, I looked at this rough flyer,” he said, “listening to this guy talk about ‘Xanadu,’ and I thought, you know, if this guy really succeeds, he will change the world. I looked around and saw all the other people in suits, and I realized I was the only one in the room who could understand.”
As soon as Nelson finished speaking, Stiegler rushed to the stage entrance, where he found Nelson, who was more famous than Stiegler realized, surrounded by a dozen admirers. Stiegler patiently waited until everyone had finished speaking, then extended his hand. “Do you have a team?” he asked. “How are you funding it?”
Nelson replied, “We’re funding it with our own money.”
Stiegler thanked the inventor and walked away. “I knew this kind of thing wouldn’t be done by three people in their spare time,” he said.
However, in 1988, Stiegler wanted to meet Eric Drexler, so he came to the “Xanadu” office, where Phil Salin began to explain to the successful executive that “Xanadu” represented the opportunity of his life.
The match between Stiegler and “Xanadu” was unlikely; Stiegler was happily unemployed, and the “Xanadu” programmers seemed to undervalue management. As Stiegler put it, in the early days at Autodesk, the initial plan was to find a well-resumed person and hide him in a cupboard until the Autodesk people came looking for him, at which point the compliant manager could prove that the hackers were already working. This was hardly Stiegler's style.
“This place is quite chaotic,” Stiegler said, explaining how he was strongly influenced by the idealistic programmers' passionate pursuit and obvious need for assistance. “But ‘Xanadu’ has this magical effect—it’s irresistible.”
This irresistible force came, first and foremost, from the great dream of “Xanadu.” Stiegler was unsure whether “Xanadu” was feasible, but if it were, the impact would be enormous. The “Xanadu” team gathered in a nice new office in Palo Alto, equipped with ample refrigerators and comfortable furniture, ready to build the ultimate hypertext system. This time, they had the tools, including the computational power they had long desired. Regular salaries allowed them to be revolutionaries and pay rent. Even their executive manager acknowledged that their mission was to change the world.
Of course, the new situation also had its confusing aspects. In 1988, “Xanadu” was forced to operate for the first time as a commercial software company. Tuesday meetings for “Xanadu” were chaotic; Nelson would arrive from his Sausalito office with note cards, tape recorders, and cameras, waving his hands angrily in front of the whiteboard. Although he did not control the development process, Nelson's energetic speeches ensured that his grand designs were not forgotten. When Nelson was not present, Miller and Gregory debated the value of the work completed during the Swarthmore summer and beyond, while programmers played their favorite game, in which any moment of aphasia or unsuccessful search for an author's name or a book title was accompanied by the traditional exclamation, “If only we had ‘Xanadu’!”
Stiegler found his work suited him well. “It was a complex time,” he said today. Looking around the office, he tried to speculate on who could help the company transition from volunteerism to profitability. Divisions were brewing: on one side, alumni from Xerox PARC liked the new programming language Smalltalk and often found consensus; on the other side, old-school C hackers, like McClary's closest friend Johan Strandberg, tended to be more skeptical, traditional, and cautious.
Then there was Roger Gregory. Stiegler described his situation with a parable. “Suppose you have a volunteer organization,” Stiegler said, “and you have to go to the North Pole. There’s a guy heading east, but he’s drifting north. This guy is a hero. He’s primarily heading east, but he will eventually reach the North Pole. He’s a hero! But in a company where you pay salaries and will eventually run out of money, that guy heading east and drifting north is the one you have to fire.”
Chapter Eleven#
Roger Gregory was crushed by the programmers' failure to deliver on their promise to Walker, who had promised a usable system within 18 months. When Miller and other more vocal members of the design team wanted to discard the first “Xanadu” code, he was vetoed by them, abandoned by Stiegler, and controlled by his own bad temper and frustration, unable to influence the development of “Xanadu.” Now, as the “Xanaduers” considered a cashless future, Gregory had nowhere to go. Other architects had promising research and industrial careers ahead of them. Gregory had a small house in Palo Alto, and he was infatuated with the future of hypertext.
For Michael McClary, the end of Autodesk's investment was an opportunity to break free. He returned to private consulting. Stiegler was also looking for an exit. He briefly paused to help the similarly abandoned AMIX transition to independence, then retired to a ranch in Arizona. “Xanadu” was the most frustrating experience of his career. “’Xanadu’,” he now says, “kept beating me.”
But the three main architects—Pandya, Tribble, and Miller—were not yet fully prepared to resign. They announced that if they could find suitable supporters to back a more modest product, they would at least temporarily abandon the larger dream of hypertext. Finding those supporters became the job of Jonathan Shapiro.
Since 1965, Shapiro had an important advantage over Marc Stiegler and the other mentors and supervisors of “Xanadu”: he did not believe hypertext could save the world. Since Nelson first offended his professors, “Xanadu” had been characterized by its aggressive posture, grand dreams, and self-aggrandizing proclamations, all part of the project's childhood and adolescence. Now, after several heavy blows, “Xanadu” seemed ready to grow up. Shapiro soon began collaborating with Miller and other designers to complete the work they had always felt they could ignore—such as identifying specific, current commercial needs that “Xanadu” could meet and creating materials to showcase to potential supporters.
To prevent years of effort from disappearing into the unreleased Autodesk software junk pile, Stiegler vigorously lobbied Autodesk to provide some transitional funding to sustain “Xanadu.” After some discussion, Autodesk generously provided a small amount of cash to the “Xanadu” team. Meanwhile, Shapiro sought buyers.
The programmers moved out of the Palo Alto office and into Dean Tribble's home. In August 1992, after Autodesk announced it was divesting “Xanadu,” ownership of the “Xanadu” Operating Company reverted to the programmers and several others who had long supported “Xanadu.” Roger Gregory and Ted Nelson now owned about half the company.
Nelson was shocked by the developments. Whenever the inventor inquired about “Xanadu's” progress at Autodesk, he was told the system would be ready in six months. It was not until a “Xanadu” meeting in the summer of 1992 that he first felt the cold shock of reality. “I suddenly had this feeling—my God, they’re not going to do it,” he said. “I had always believed they would.”
Nelson watched the derivative drama cautiously. After Mark Stiegler left “Xanadu,” Jonathan Shapiro became the new CEO of the newly independent company. The new executive's conclusion was that “Xanadu's” key lay in its potential as part of a publishing and royalty system, and he contacted a company trying to manage a large number of copyright and licensing contracts—Kinko's. The proprietary data structure of “Xanadu” offered the possibility of a unified tracking system for all university materials printed by Kinko's. Shapiro believed that with the transitional funding provided by Autodesk, along with a viable demonstration of the system, he could secure a deal with Kinko's or another publisher within 30 days.
However, the Kinko's deal resembled a royalty publishing plan owned by Ted Nelson rather than the “Xanadu” Operating Company. Ultimately, Jonathan Shapiro failed to sell “Xanadu” to Kinko's. Instead, the “Xanadu” programmers staged one of the strangest shareholder battles the confused executive had ever seen.
Chapter Fourteen#
Until 1987, “Xanadu” had been a collaborative enterprise, a group of brave crusaders united by the creed of “sharing in common.” Some, like Michael McClary, recognized the instability of this arrangement and were reluctant to participate before stock issuance and salary payments. But the “Silver Agreement” of 1988 created two “Xanadus.” Nelson's “Xanadu” was his imagined information franchise system. The “Silver Agreement” granted Nelson exclusive rights to any royalty-based publishing business. Meanwhile, the “Xanadu” Operating Company retained ownership of the software developed by Roger Gregory and others. The “Silver Agreement” required the “Xanadu” Operating Company to provide Nelson with the Xanadu software for use in his “Xanadu” franchise while allowing the company to control the software's development and use it in any other commercial risks.
Nelson's success depended on the success of the “Xanadu” Operating Company—without the foundational technology, there would be no franchise. Nelson remained the largest shareholder of the company. But so far, Nelson's franchise had been an illusory business based on nonexistent technology, a dream built on dreams.
Now that this fantasy had the potential to become reality, certain aspects of the “Silver Agreement” seemed murky. After all, what is publishing? If Kinko's intended to use “Xanadu” technology to track its copying business to satisfy agreements with copyright holders, wouldn’t that be very close to the royalty-based publishing business reserved for Nelson? And the “Xanadu” Operating Company had another problem. Most programmers held only trivial shares. Now that Autodesk had kicked them out, they were facing a tough period of low salaries. Shapiro wanted to further expand the company's ownership. However, Nelson did not want to share his stock.
Just as negotiations with Kinko's were underway, Nelson attempted to take over the company. His lifelong dream was about to take its first step toward true realization, even though this dream might shatter. In the early 1980s, programmers had witnessed Nelson's management style, and they refused to work for him.
“There’s nothing to argue about,” Shapiro said. “If we don’t finish this technology and sell it, everyone will die. But Ted is determined to control it. The more Ted insists on controlling it, the more the programmers are determined not to be controlled by him.”
Nelson accused Miller, Stiegler, and Shapiro of causing the long delays of “Xanadu.” When Autodesk invested, he relinquished control over the software development process, but he comforted himself with the belief that professionals were qualified to complete their tasks. Since these professionals had utterly failed, Nelson wanted his company back.
The programmers refused to work for Nelson. Miller and Shapiro believed they could retain control of “Xanadu” because Nelson was incapable of completing the code himself and lacked the funds to hire new programmers. But they were facing a strategic master who understood the power of escalating situations. Nelson quickly found a way to provoke the anticipated crisis. “I nominate Roger Gregory for the board,” Nelson recalled with satisfaction. The two of them owned nearly half the company, and together they could thwart any plans. Nelson said, “The reaction was as if I had set fire to the curtains.”
The final battle for control of “Xanadu” did not go smoothly. After Stiegler resigned, Shapiro became the embodiment of the narrow-minded manager and punitive authority figure that the inventor despised. To Nelson, Shapiro was a “jerk.” To Shapiro, Nelson was “an arrogant jerk.” Nelson claimed not to remember the details of the conflict, but according to Shapiro, the conflict ended at a board meeting in late 1992 when Nelson bluntly stated that he would not cooperate with any plans controlled by Shapiro.
Shapiro countered that if Nelson would give up more ownership of the company to the programmers, he would agree to resign as CEO. Nelson accepted the deal, the stock was redistributed, and Shapiro left.
For the programmers, this was a Pyrrhic victory. By the end of the battle, Kinko's senior management had stopped returning calls, most of Autodesk's transitional funding had been spent on legal fees, and the “Xanadu” team had gained ownership of a worthless company.
“Xanadu” had died so many times, and now it was dead again.
Chapter Fifteen#
As “Xanadu” lay dying, Charlie Smith started a company. It was called Memex, and its first product would be a records system for insurance companies. Smith studied the legacy of “Xanadu,” and although “Xanadu” had no money, no usable code, and no prospects, it did possess some excellent data storage and retrieval algorithms that Smith believed he might use in the software he was about to build.
What Smith offered was only a half-success—a barely successful one. Under Memex, the code would be stripped from its integrated global information network. The “Xanadu” that inherited so much hope would become a “donor,” its powerful algorithmic heart beating at the center of the insurance industry's database.
Smith had little money. But