Project Xanadu: Even More Hindsight · Gwern.net Skip to main content Warning: JavaScript Disabled! For support of key website features (link annotation popups/popovers & transclusions, collapsible sections, backlinks, tablesorting, image zooming, sidenotes etc.), you must enable JavaScript. Site Me New Blog Links Patreon Substack Project Xanadu: Even More Hindsight JS , design , meta Retrospective on Project Xanadu’s success and failure: a lack of design iteration, meaningful use-cases, or practicality stopped a valuable vision from maturing into something useful. (And contrasted with my approach.) 2025-05-05 finished certainty : possible importance : 4 bibliography In December 2024 during a visit to San Francisco, I was lucky enough to be invited at the last minute to a party that could only have happened there: a celebration of the 50 th anniversary of hypermedia visionary Ted Nelson’s 1974 52ya manifesto, Computer Lib/Dream Machines , extolling the vision of Project Xanadu hypertext . I’ve contributed to English Wikipedia for 20 years now, and I’ve been working on Gwern.net on and off for 15 years now, so I could not possibly miss an entire party of people with strong opinions on hypertext. Our host, James, had arranged for a surprisingly extensive collection of Nelson memorabilia: not just copies of that book (far larger and more impressive in person than I had realized, similar to a Compact OED in requiring a magnifying glass, also provided), or Nelson’s 1997 29ya book The Future of Information , but also copies of his Swarthmore College mimeograph magazines, and most impressive of all—several vintage computers running copies of various Xanadu implementations. Ted Nelson was still alive at age 87, but unfortunately could not attend. Fortunately, one of the attendees was one of the former Xanadu programmers from the Autodesk era (c. 1988 – 5 1993 33ya ), and we could listen to some of his stories. They were a reminder of how, while we romanticize earlier eras of