Compiled from: an article in Wired magazine from June 1995: 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 an impolite left turn in the 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 actions,” he said. “It's one of my unfinished projects.”
Nelson is a pale, angular, energetic person, dressed in clothes with many pockets. In these pockets, he carries an astonishing number of items. Anything that doesn't fit in his pockets is tied 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 spiral notebook in a leather bag, a huge keychain on a long retractable chain, an Opha knife, sticky notes, 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, all cut by hired printers) ultimately became part of Nelson's unique filing system. This system is a source of amusement 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 filed it, so I'll buy you a new one.’” For a time, Nelson wore a purple belt made of two dog collars, which delighted him because he loved finding innovative uses for things.
Nelson's life is filled with unfinished projects, arguably composed of them, 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 full of 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 sticky notes.
All of Nelson's imagination does not hold equal status. 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 other companies find hard to surpass. In fact, Nelson only began to build his reputation as the king of failed software development around 1960, making “Xanadu” interesting for another reason: the project's failure (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. The goal of “Xanadu” was to become 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 heal political misunderstandings. Moreover, based on the very trite 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 chilling lunch journey, Nelson's battered 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 incomplete autobiography. “It's a good beginning,” he said, “When I was four or five years old, I rowed with my grandfather and grandmother, and my hands were 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 constantly 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 various places 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.”
The chaotic and brief whirlpool of his grandfather's 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 worried about being accurately quoted, but because his tape recorder and camera were weapons in the endless battle against forgetfulness. This inventor suffers from an extreme case of Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD), a psychological syndrome recently named, characterized by an unusual sensitivity to external distractions.
If he stops in the middle of doing something, he immediately forgets. Only by turning on his tape recorder can Nelson be sure that his words won't irretrievably float away into the atmosphere.
Nelson's anxiety about forgetting is complicated by the medications he takes. For his ADD, Nelson takes Cylert; for his restlessness, 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 bit 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. This inventor's hummingbird mind and his inability to do anything left him relatively helpless. He wanted to be a writer and filmmaker, but he needed a way to avoid getting lost in the chaotic 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 the programming world, 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 are right. I easily have accidents and am very impatient. I can't use my Macintosh—I have three that don't work at all, and one that barely works.”
“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 it going,” he replied. Nelson was satisfied with the camera running, so he turned it around the room. Then he put it down and continued his speech. His lunch, a large plate of pasta and seafood, had long been served, and he took a bite and forgot it completely.
Nelson never cataloged the thousands of hours of audio and video tapes he had. This would be impossible because they were coextensive with his real life, and it would also be unnecessary because 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 filing cabinets in Nelson's office could 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 he is a mental patient of World War II—when the blitzkrieg comes, he feels his health suddenly improves, while during the “Battle of the Bulge,” he suffers from a terrible headache. Nelson's distractibility, lack of focus, obsession with minutiae, and his dedication to recording events he will never analyze are all 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 devoted his youth to learning the art of strategy, learning to pick up serious weapons like stones or sticks when bullied by neighbors. While studying graduate school at Harvard, Nelson would one day study strategy with the renowned theorist Thomas Schelling, but as a child, his methods were instinctive. For example, in second grade, Nelson invented a new way to cross the street: when he reached a busy street, he would dramatically dodge traffic and walk off the sidewalk with theatrical indifference. Drivers would be startled 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 kept in touch with his son; he was a film director (having made films like Requiem for a Heavyweight and Soldier Blue), and inspired young Nelson to begin his own (unfinished) cinematic epic, The Epiphany of Slocum Furlow. When it came to his actress mother, Nelson merely 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 with school, once plotting to stab his seventh-grade teacher with a sharpened screwdriver, but at the last moment, he lost his nerve, walked out of the classroom, and never returned. 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 made him sympathetic, filled 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 claimed that all categories were 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 not interested in the smooth, progressive narratives 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 anti-forgetting person, a denier of all forms of loss and grief. (Some of Nelson's disciples would one day take this war against loss further, dedicating themselves 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 annihilation of life on Earth. The idea that some spiritual connection or relationship might disappear was intolerable. Nelson believed that not only did the constant fluctuation and dispersion 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 features for side-by-side comparison of alternative versions of text, tracing back through sequential versions, and modifying by outline. 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 different 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 Association for Computing Machinery national conference. In designing the non-sequential writing tool, Nelson also proposed a feature called “compressed lists,” where elements in one text would link to related or identical elements in other texts. Nelson's two interests, screen editing and non-sequential writing, were merging. With 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 commentary blocks arranged in concentric rectangular patterns around the pages. 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 this eccentric researcher, but despite the intrigue of his ideas, Nelson lacked the technical knowledge to prove that the system he envisioned could be built.
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 employed by publishing giant Harcourt, advising them on computer-based business opportunities, and his radical rhetoric left executives bewildered. Meanwhile, he seized every opportunity to tell computer scientists that they did not understand the earth-shattering significance of their work, which annoyed the computer scientists. 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 enormous 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 evident, 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; the native domain of hypertext was on the screen, not on the page. Later that year, Nelson obtained permission from Vladimir Nabokov (Pale Fire) to use his meticulously annotated parody in a hypertext demonstration. Like most of Nelson's contributions, this idea was rejected by the sponsors of the Brown experiment. Nelson was pained by the obstacles to his work. “Thus, progress must wait,” he later wrote, “waiting for the halting and limping to catch up.”
Nelson's unique anger persisted and undermined him during these difficult years after college. His most productive period 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 the poem, Coleridge claimed to awaken from an anesthetic reverie with hundreds of lines of poetry in his mind. Just as he was about to write them down, 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” was 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 types of programs he spoke of required enormous memory and processing power. Even today, the technology to realize a global “Xanadu” network does not exist. As early as 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 interrelated 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 undoubtedly make him fall.
Others working in computing were not so optimistic. In search of help, Nelson was forced to leave official channels. The first disciples he gained belonged to a group of hackers known as R.E.S.I.S.T.O.R.S. (Resistors), representing students with a keen interest in science, technology, and other research (Radically Emphatic Students Interested in Science, Technology, and Other Research Studies). Unlike the mainstream programmers Nelson encountered, these Resistors shared his sense of humor, mischief, and disrespect for authority. Another benefit 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, with an average age of about 15. Nelson's influence on some of them was lifelong. Nearly 20 years later, when 14-year-old Lauren Sarno met Nelson, she was still a Resistor and 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 appreciated 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 going to turn,” one of the teenagers 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 this time as “talking about systems, discussing details.” From all appearances, this was mainly 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 views between columns or trees.
Unfortunately, beyond 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 those working on it were prohibited from revealing its inner nature. This silence naturally gave rise to 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 philosophy and its intellectual influence 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 a 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 had 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 increasingly approached 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 non-stop. 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 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, he expected to print about 40 pages of typed text on ordinary 8.2×11-inch paper. By the summer of 1974, after 18 months of frantic labor, and weeks of cutting and pasting day and night, Nelson held a chaotic 1200-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 ace high doubles, or as Nelson liked to point out, like an Italian/Polish joke book. One cover displays a revolutionary fist inside a computer. When readers opened the book, they saw 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 high, containing 300,000 words of a digital revolution manifesto. 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 paper to a printing shop; and weeks later returned to pick up several boxes of books. When he discovered that about a third of the pages in the book were out of order, he had the printing shop 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 the author, Computer Lib contains anything Nelson felt angry or inspired about 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 “didn't fit anywhere else, so they might as well be here,” are typical transitions in Computer Lib. The model for this book is Stewart Brand's 1969 countercultural classic The 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, they cannot be used as references without sufficient reading time to memorize them. Of course, this is precisely what many young hackers did.
What moved 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 for 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 of 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 far 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 Abraham Lincoln had, 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 about 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 had 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 around various computer labs at the University of Michigan, belonging 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 sci-fi nerds, 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; 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 faster: just as he returned to Ann Arbor, Nelson called Newman Computer Exchange, asking the person on the line to exchange 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 scorn 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 the hypertext project.
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 would be Gregory who oversaw attempts to transform “Xanadu” into a real product. Gregory never received much public attention, but after experiencing all the painful deaths and rebirths of the 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 ideas about 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, and their reaction was, “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, with his shirt pocket stuffed with pens, wearing a pair of Mickey Mouse ears. Miller believed that Nelson's denial of human forgetfulness seemed right, and he hoped to create a system that would capture his consciousness in a computer program, thus achieving immortality. Miller's middle name is Samuel, which he spelled as $amuel to express his confidence that the market could 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 on 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 obediently 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 difficulties of writing truly effective hypertext code. Although they planned to write 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 method for data to move 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 declining 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 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 idea of hammering 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 seems 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.
“The 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 repair 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; computers were 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, having 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,” working about 40 hours a week on the project, and he opened his home to anyone he thought could help. Mark Miller had returned to Yale to begin his senior year, but he stayed in touch and continued to offer advice. Eric Hill and Roland King both joined the household. Eric Drexler, a graduate student obsessed with solar sails and micro-machines for space travel, was a frequent visitor and friendly critic.
After using up the Onyx, Gregory began searching for a new computer and became the first person to purchase a Sun without government or educational 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, the “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 had little time left. Now, the inventor's ideas were more mature. Miller and Gregory created an addressing system using hyperdimensional numbers, a mysterious realm of calculus they had both studied in college. They called the new addressing system “tumblers”; the tumbler system allowed readers to create links to arbitrary byte spans, regardless of whether the author had marked them. Through the tumbler, Miller and Gregory could provide similar addresses for every document and document fragment in “Xanadu” containing words, images, films, and sounds. 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 novelty of the design and the interest of the algorithms, it was frustrating that the “Xanadu” code was non-functional. As 1979 stretched into 1980 and 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 immutable files, only vast amounts of material that could be organized according to the reader's preferences.
In 1980, genius Miller graduated from Yale but failed to return to Gregory's home. Instead, he moved to a hardware company in San Antonio, Texas, called Datapoint, 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 principles 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, and Nelson moved to Texas, while Gregory also 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 buddies camped 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 relying 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 that took them far away and then ultimately brought them back.
For example, the programmer Michael McClary, who had introduced Gregory to the concept of hypertext ten years 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 in writing lengthy, complex programs in C. His method was to spend days absorbing the design, carefully planning his approach, and then implementing his plan in long periods 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 arrangement of “Xanadu.” No contracts, no paperwork, no organization. Gregory and his informal assistants took extensive notes but never mentioned them 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 noted that there was no evidence that the hackers might have any claims 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 fluctuations, feeling disappointed with years of unproductive work, and drove away his colleague. After a dispute 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 was pure Nelson: it had a Chapter 0, seven Chapter 1s, a Chapter 2, and seven Chapter 3s. In his introduction, Nelson suggested that readers start with Chapter 1, then read Chapter 2, then explore Chapter 3, and then restart, reading Chapter 2 again and again. He also provided a chart that read: “Pretzel (size) or infinity, you decide.” The official title page read: Literary Machines: A Report on Project Xanadu Regarding World Processing, Electronic Publishing, Hypertext, Universal Crafts, the Knowledge Revolution of the Future, 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 concrete things. Even Roger Gregory was beginning to lose heart. With the exception of Gregory, all the major “Xanadu” programmers were actively engaged in other work. By the mid-1980s, the most rational hope for “Xanadu” was that the project would indirectly exercise its power through the work of Miller, Greene, and others scattered across companies worldwide. Miller was now an up-and-coming 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 then living in San Antonio, and after Datapoint collapsed due to financial scandals, he began to struggle financially.
It was extremely painful; he felt anger at the setbacks but was powerless to grieve and continued to move forward. Around this time, Nelson contemplated suicide, even holding the pills in his hand. He ended his revised Literary Machines with a farewell: “We have held on to the ideals 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 flutter in the wind. But it is dark, silent, and lonely here, and there is no dawn.”
The “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 transcended their time. But by the mid-1980s, they were just beginning to lead.
Chapter Nine#
Around 1980, Gayle Pergamit first heard about “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 had written 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 hated to throw 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—such as 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 programmers' conventions, where he showcased a difficult-to-convince “Xanadu” demonstration. His natural habitat was hacker conferences, which were originally informal gatherings of the people described in Steven Levy's bestselling book Hackers. Over the years, the number of hackers had increased, 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 take place that fall at a Jewish camp in Saratoga, California. Programmers lived in cabins on stilts, meeting in a country 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 a question at 2:45 on Saturday afternoon: “Can hackers get big?”
One of the attendees was a hacker who had recently made it very big. At one of the meetings, Autodesk's legendary founder John Walker sat stiffly next to 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 he 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, 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 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 its original partners (the programmers) with a way to produce and sell tools. When Autodesk's founders wrote a passionate article about “Xanadu,” their executives tended to pay attention.
After Walker's proposal, the two sides engaged in a tense negotiation for a time. Phil Salin and Roger Gregory spent months working with Autodesk's lawyers. Soon, the informal business arrangements of the “Xanadu” personnel began to trouble them again. Ted Nelson insisted that any sales or licensing to Autodesk could not interfere with the grand plans of the inventor regarding the universal library and publishing system. Nelson wanted to ensure that if Autodesk had a usable product, he would be completely free 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 known as “The Silver Agreement,” which generously granted Nelson the exclusive rights to establish a patent-based publishing system using any “Xanadu” technology developed by Gregory and Autodesk. Nelson was granted the right 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 the prestigious title of “Autodesk Fellow” and have an office at Autodesk headquarters, but he would have no direct role in managing software development. This arrangement was significant because, despite Nelson's inspiring speeches, his high self-esteem and his obvious 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 most wanted 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 the ambiguities in the “Silver Agreement.” “In hindsight,” one former executive of “Xanadu” stated, “I think the lawyer who drafted that agreement should be shot.”
However, in 1988, the deal with Autodesk was just good news. On April 6, John Walker released 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 launched within 18 months.
“In 1964,” Walker confidently announced, “Xanadu was a dream in the hearts of men. In 1980, it was a common goal of a small group of outstanding technicians. By 1989, it would become a product. By 1995, it would begin to change the world.”
Gregory entered hacker 3.0 under a cloud. By the summer of the following year, he became 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 desire for Autodesk to 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 no longer 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 in Autodesk's Sausalito headquarters. The programmers' offices were located more than 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 fringes of indifferent institutions, finally having the opportunity to establish their own working conditions and create 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 that there was comfortable furniture and nutritious food in the office.
Mark Miller succumbed to the allure of “Xanadu,” returning to the project full-time. The newly established “Xanadu” base on California Avenue was remodeled to resemble the environment of Xerox PARC. The programmers' offices opened onto a large communal space, with walls covered in whiteboards that quickly became filled with colorful lines, words, 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 number of usable programs in C. He abandoned his lucrative consulting business in Michigan to rejoin 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 CD-ROM conference sponsored by Microsoft, where he found himself in front of an audience of 1,000 listening to a speaker he did not know. He was looking at a very amateurish “Xanadu” flyer while listening to Ted Nelson's frenetic 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 speeches, 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 entrance of the stage, where he found Nelson, who was more famous than Stiegler realized, surrounded by a dozen admirers. Stiegler waited patiently for everyone to finish 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 explaining 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 someone with a good resume, hide him in a closet until the Autodesk people came looking for him, at which point the compliant manager could prove that the hackers were capable of 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, last, and always from the great dream of “Xanadu.” Stiegler was uncertain whether “Xanadu” was feasible, but if it were, the impact would be enormous. The “Xanadu” team gathered in a beautiful 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 computing power they longed for. 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 had its confusing aspects. In 1988, “Xanadu” was forced to operate for the first time as a commercial software company. The Tuesday meetings of “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 had no control over 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 the 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 complicated 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 common ground; on the other side, old-school C language hackers, like McClary's closest friend Johan Strandberg, tended to be more skeptical, traditional, and cautious.
Then there was Roger Gregory. Stiegler described his predicament with a fable. “Suppose you have a volunteer organization,” Stiegler said, “and you have to go to the North Pole. There’s a guy going east, but he’s drifting north. This guy is a hero. He’s mainly going east, but he’s going to reach the North Pole in the end. He’s a hero! But in a company where you pay salaries and eventually run out of money, that guy going east and drifting north is the one you have to fire.”
Chapter Eleven#
Roger Gregory was crushed by the programmers' failure to deliver on his promise to Walker, who had promised a usable system within 18 months. When Miller and other more vocal design team members wanted to discard the first “Xanadu” code, he was vetoed, he was abandoned by Stiegler, and he was controlled by his own bad temper and frustration, unable to influence the development of “Xanadu.” Now, as the “Xanaduers” contemplated a cashless future, Gregory had nowhere to go. Other architects had promising research and industrial careers ahead. 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 Jonathan Shapiro's job.
Since 1965, Shapiro had an important advantage over Marc Stiegler and the other mentors and overseers 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 quickly began working 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 trash heap of unreleased Autodesk software, Stiegler vigorously lobbied Autodesk to provide some transitional funding to sustain “Xanadu.” After some discussion, Autodesk generously granted the “Xanadu” team a small amount of cash. 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 Xanadu Operating Company reverted to the programmers and several others who had long supported “Xanadu.” Roger Gregory and Ted Nelson now owned about half of 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 cautiously watched this derivative drama unfold. 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 reached out to a company attempting 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, combined 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 that would be owned by Ted Nelson rather than “Xanadu Operating Company.” In the end, 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, “Xanadu Operating Company” retained ownership of the software developed by Roger Gregory and others. The “Silver Agreement” required “Xanadu Operating Company” to provide Nelson with the Xanadu software for use in his Xanadu franchise while allowing the company to control the development of the software and use it in any other commercial risks.
Nelson's success depended on the success of “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 “Xanadu Operating Company” had another problem. Most programmers held negligible shares. Now that Autodesk had pushed them out, they were facing a period of hard work with low pay. Shapiro wanted to further expand the ownership of the company. 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 that dream might shatter. In the early 1980s, the programmers had witnessed Nelson's management style, and they rejected 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 to resist his control.”
Nelson blamed Miller, Stiegler, and Shapiro for 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 thoroughly 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 lacked the ability to complete the code himself and had no money to hire new programmers. But they were up against a strategic master who understood the power of escalating situations. Nelson quickly found a way to provoke the anticipated crisis. “I nominate Roger Gregory to the board,” Nelson recalled with satisfaction. The two of them owned nearly half the company, and together they could almost thwart any plan. 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 in Nelson's eyes. 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 transferred 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 time the battle ended, Kinko's upper 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 it had died again.
Chapter Fifteen#
As “Xanadu” lay dying, Charlie Smith started a company. It was called Memex, and its first product would be a record-keeping 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 thought he might use in the software he was about to build.
What Smith offered was only a half-success—a barely success. Under Memex, the code would be stripped from its comprehensive global information network. The “Xanadu”