The devil's in the details with these things. The outline of Xanadu in Literary Machines (which corresponds to the 1987 version that Autodesk paid to be developed) is very detailed, but what is missing is very telling.
There's a rather clever scalable addressing system, but the algorithm for searching through the resulting data structure (the enfilade algorithm) has never effectively been published. There was source published about five years ago in the Xanadu Green and Gold releases, but that was a bunch of uncommented Smalltalk and C code. Ted's claims for that algorithm are almost certainly an exaggeration of its actual capabilities.
Similarly, there's a fairly detailed sketch of a client-server API (the FEBE, or Front-End-Back-End, protocol). Literary Machines includes the throwaway line that the corresponding BEBE (Back-End-Back-End) protocol was under development. This is *the* crucial part of the system, to my mind; it determines whether Xanadu could be a viable *global* hypertext system. My PhD research touched on some closely related topics, and I studied all I could about Xanadu. I finally got to ask Ted about it while he was living in Southampton, and he admitted that the BEBE had never been written.
I wouldn't go so far as to say that Xanadu couldn't be implemented, but getting it to scale while retaining global link consistency would be a significant problem.
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Date: 2007-05-17 10:28 pm (UTC)There's a rather clever scalable addressing system, but the algorithm for searching through the resulting data structure (the enfilade algorithm) has never effectively been published. There was source published about five years ago in the Xanadu Green and Gold releases, but that was a bunch of uncommented Smalltalk and C code. Ted's claims for that algorithm are almost certainly an exaggeration of its actual capabilities.
Similarly, there's a fairly detailed sketch of a client-server API (the FEBE, or Front-End-Back-End, protocol). Literary Machines includes the throwaway line that the corresponding BEBE (Back-End-Back-End) protocol was under development. This is *the* crucial part of the system, to my mind; it determines whether Xanadu could be a viable *global* hypertext system. My PhD research touched on some closely related topics, and I studied all I could about Xanadu. I finally got to ask Ted about it while he was living in Southampton, and he admitted that the BEBE had never been written.
I wouldn't go so far as to say that Xanadu couldn't be implemented, but getting it to scale while retaining global link consistency would be a significant problem.